Indy Pass Is a Better Alternative to Ikon, Epic, Mountain Collective Than You Think
As long as you don’t live in Colorado, Utah, or Northern California
Less than a bucket of beer and more fun than a full-moon beach rave
Let’s start with price because price is The Thing – here are the early-bird 2025-26 rates for the national versions of all four U.S.-based multimountain passes:
That’s a lot of numbers, and a lot of parentheses. You’re already reaching for the eject button. Maybe this will help – a simplified look at how much it would cost a family of four (with two kids 6 to 12 and no renewal discounts), to get in the door for early-bird versions of each pass:
Note the numbers in the bottom two rows, this is how much more four of those passes will cost the family than four Indy Base passes.
Wild, right? And it holds across all kinds of families:
Now, all of these passes are great deals for frequent skiers, and you can craft a pretty solid ski season around any one of them.
But not equally, and not everywhere. Ikon is next to worthless in the Midwest outside of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Indy and Mountain Collective aren’t going to work for locals in the Big Three ski markets – I-70 Colorado, the Wasatch, and Tahoe. And there’s an Epic-sized hole in the Upper Rockies. But there is one pass that, for the majority of skiers in the majority of markets, is going to provide the best value, variety, and flexibility; offer both daytrip and vacation options; and do all that while skirting the worst of skiing’s traffic and on-mountain crowding woes.
And that pass is the Indy Pass.
The immediate, reflexive reaction from Big Mountain Ski Bro – even as we enter season seven of this ever-growing ski pass – is some version of “but there’s nothing worth skiing on it.”
But Big Mountain Ski Bro lives in Truckee and skis 150 days per year, 145 of them at the same mountain. And while I appreciate his perspective and love of his local, his ski world is not most of our ski worlds. Most of us live in or near a city and go to work Monday through Friday and ski when we can, which is typically weekends and a vacation or two per season. And for Rest of Us Bro, Indy’s roster is an aircraft carrier loaded with fighter jets ready to carry us into a bomber winter.
So how can I be so sure that Indy is an adequate stand-in for Brand Name Super Pass X, when your cousin who lives in Denver tells you that all the mountains on there suck? Well, I’ve probably actually skied at more Indy Pass mountains than Keystone Craig or Breckenridge Brent or Copper Mountain Carl. And with full respect to the Wasatch Six and the Ring Around Lake Tahoe and the I-70 Superships and Jackson and Big Sky (all of which I’ve also skied, all of which I love), these are not the only ski areas worthy of a transcontinental voyage. Here’s the kind of winter Indy can give you if you let it: