Indy Pass Adds Ragged, 5 Additional North American Ski Areas & 4 in Japan; Passes Back on Sale Today
Ragged, Mt. Abram, Camden Snow Bowl, Middlebury Snowbowl, Hatley Pointe, Cape Smokey join Indy for 2024-25 ski season
Indy Pass today added 10 new full Alpine partners for the 2024-25 ski season, giving passholders two days each at some regionally compelling mountains:
Ragged’s addition means that Pacific Group Resorts’ (PGRI) entire six-mountain portfolio is now aligned with Indy. Jay Peak’s partnership pre-dates PGRI’s acquisition, and the company added its other four resorts in March (when three other ski areas also joined).
Both Indy and PGRI had hesitated in adding Ragged, concerned that too many Indy Pass partners would negatively impact local mountains’ season pass sales.
“Adding Ragged was complex,” Indy Pass Director Erik Mogensen told The Storm. “For the Indy Pass to work long-term, we can’t cannibalize our partners’ products. We have to truly support them with new visits, not just put more dots on the map. We are sitting on a ton of purchase and usage data that shows that adding Ragged won’t hurt our other partners.”
Indy and PGRI added Ragged only after consultation with local mountains on the alliance.
“The density of resort partners in New Hampshire, and the Northeast in general, complicated the deal,” PGRI Chief Marketing Officer Christian Knapp told The Storm. “We needed extra time for due diligence and wanted to make sure it was the right addition for all parties. The vote of confidence from the Indy team and resorts we know and respect like Pats Peak, Cannon, and Waterville Valley got it over the finish line.”
Today’s additions push Indy closed to the 200-resort threshold promised during the spring sale. Here’s a look at Indy’s potential 2024-25 roster, which includes most of last winter’s lineup, plus the newly announced resorts (Indy will announce blackout dates this fall):
Powder Mountain and Mt. Ashland, which both joined the pass ahead of the 2021-22 ski season, have indicated they will not renew their Indy Pass contracts for next winter. Huff Hills’ management is in the midst of a dispute with the ski area’s property owners, and may not open for the 2024-25 ski season.
Regardless, today’s rookie class pushes enough extra capacity into Indy’s network that the pass is offering a flash summer sale. Anyone currently on the waitlist can buy their passes starting today, July 1. Add-on passes, for season passholders at Indy Pass partner resorts, go on sale Wednesday, July 3. Indy will offer any remaining inventory to the general public on Wednesday, July 4. Prices tick up just slightly from their spring rates:
Indy Pass will not guarantee a fall sale. Pass officials have indicated to The Storm, however, that another partner announcement is likely later this year. Barring a larger-than-expected exodus of legacy partners, a new influx of ski areas could set conditions for an additional pass sale.
But this could also be it. For New England skiers, there is no more compelling product than Indy Pass, which now delivers access to a remarkable 21 ski areas in the six-state region. That’s more than Epic (7) and Ikon (7) combined, and 33 percent of all mountains with a chairlift (64 total – chart below). Even for skiers who already secured some version of an Epic or Ikon Pass, Indy is a knockout supplemental product, and one whose cost is easy to justify in a region of rising day-ticket rates.
The other additions offer their own new dimensions to Indy. Hatley Pointe strengthens an already incredible Southeast/Mid-Atlantic roster. While Cape Smokey, hanging off the edge of Nova Scotia, is a haul from Indy’s New England core – it’s an eight-and-a-half-hour drive from Bigrock, Maine, which is itself four-and-a-half hours past Black Mountain of Maine – the coastal jewel is an important outpost as Indy anchors itself in the vast and crucial eastern Canadian markets. And while the Japanese destinations remain distant fantasies rather than core pass selling points, the scale of the additional resorts, as well as their growing numbers, hint at Indy’s vast potential in a world where thousands of unaffiliated ski areas remain.
Here's a breakdown of each of Indy’s new partners, along with analysis of what these new additions mean for skiers, Indy Pass, and the megapass landscape as a whole:
Indy’s New England Wall
It took Vail so long to get to New England that the company’s 2017 purchase of Stowe surprised almost everyone. It would have been perfectly rational to assume they weren’t interested. Even then, the purchase was easy to understand: this wasn’t some Ice Coast nubbin’, but snowy, sprawling Stowe, with Mt. Mansfield above and the Front Four strafing down and the picturesque town below. Only when Vail added a half dozen more New England resorts over the next two years and launched Northeast-specific Epic Passes in 2020 did it finally become clear that Captain Colorado saw value in this frozen, densely populated, and monied region.
But Indy included New England from the outset in 2019. Eternal credit to founder Doug Fish, a Pacific Northwesterner who had never skied east of the Mississippi, for resisting the dismissive instincts of so many western skiers, who can’t imagine that a turn below 5,000 feet could be a turn worth taking. The pass’ Northeast lineup wasn’t particularly deep that first season – Catamount, Berkshire East, Magic, Bolton Valley, Black Mountain NH, a few others – but the rapid additions of big-name Cannon, Jay Peak, Saddleback, and Waterville Valley quickly transformed Indy into a legitimate alternative (or complement) to an Epic or Ikon Pass.
With a knockout lineup of day-trippable-from-Boston ski areas, the Northeast soon accounted for nearly half of Indy’s annual sales. This became Indy’s New England Wall. The pass would have a hard time penetrating Epic- and Ikon-ruled Colorado, Utah, and Tahoe – where, more than five years in, Indy’s presence is, respectively, slow-growing, shrinking, and non-existent – but so long as they kept the roster stable in New England, the pass was anchored to bedrock.