Indy Shores Up New England, East Coast Rosters With Beginner Centers in CT, NH, NY, PA

Powder Ridge, Connecticut; Veterans Memorial, New Hampshire; Mt. Pisgah, New York; and Spring Mountain, Pennsylvania join Indy’s 2026-27 roster

While general panic has settled in amongst a small number of Storm diehards that the new PodPost format has displaced written content 4EVA, I would like to assure you that is not the case. I am still a writer with a PodPost and not a PodPoster with a newsletter, and that is a very important distinction, mostly in that while it already feels absurd and pretentious to refer to oneself as a writer, doing so is at least a custom that stretches back several centuries rather than the commandeering of a made-up 15-year-old job that only exists because of a 30-year-old technology.

With that disclaimer I will now return to breaking down the approximately 60 ski areas that have in recent weeks joined the Indy, Ikon, and Snow passes. For about five seconds I managed to keep up with Indy’s weeklong beginning-of-September blitz, but I was quickly overwhelmed and had to issue rainchecks while promising to get back to you. The first two posts covered five ski areas apiece, spread all over the world. I also managed a third wrap-up piece on Indy’s latest goldmine: Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont.

Given that I’m no longer breaking this news, my analysis of the remaining ski areas will depart from Indy’s day-by-day across-the-globe release schedule and I will instead bunch resorts by geography.

I’ll start, in this post (the first of several), with the eastern U.S., mostly because I’ve actually skied at most of these places and because it’s Indy’s region of greatest strength, both in number and density of partners and in passholders and sales. Multi-mountain passes are in fact strong across the East: an incredible 101 ski areas have joined Indy (61), Epic (16), Ikon (14), Snow Pass (11), or Mountain Collective (3) in the region:

Best viewed on stone tablet.

According to this DeepChart, which is so absurd that I generally avoid acknowledging its existence, that equals 51 percent of the 198 active ski areas in the U.S. East, and 68 percent of the region’s 137 public ski areas that run chairlifts.

Today, I’ll take a deeper look at four of these 2026 Indy joiners:

• Powder Ridge is Indy’s second ski area in Connecticut, joining longtime partner Mohawk.

• Veterans Memorial is Indy’s 11^th partner in New Hampshire and 30^th in New England overall. It’s also Indy’s 14^th alpine ski area that operates only surface lifts.

• Spring Mountain is Indy’s eighth ski area in Pennsylvania. Of the state’s 21 public, chairlift-served ski areas, just three have not yet joined Epic, Ikon, or Indy: the nominally interesting, municipally owned Boyce Park; the surprisingly snowy Mount Pleasant; and the spectacular-but-mysterious Elk Mountain.

• Mt. Pisgah is the 13^th New York ski area to join Indy’s 2026-27 roster. Despite having more ski areas (49) than any other state, New York’s mountains remain slimly represented among national passes on a proportional basis: just 19 have joined Epic, Indy, Snow Pass, or Mountain Collective, and none are currently on Ikon.

By the way, if you ever want to browse archived this-mountain-joined-this-pass stories, I’ve written 80 since 2020 that you can read here. I didn’t start splitting single releases out into multiple stories until Indy started announcing 35 ski areas in one day, so many of these analyze multiple ski area additions to a single pass.

Anyway, back to 2026:

Powder Ridge, Connecticut

The 747 lift is probably still listed here because the guy who drew the map quit and no one knows how to make a new one. Or something. Anyway that lift is basically sitting in pieces so I doubt it will be running when you show up to ski.

My Take

If you’re not from New York or haven’t spent any time in New York it would be fair to assume that Connecticut, the northern Triforce piece of the NY-NJ-CT Tri-State Region, is some sort of seventh-borough bridge-and-tunnel Jersey-Long-Island addendum, shirtless legions dumping off Metro North trains with rattlesnake bicep tats and brass knuckles, asking “Yo which way to the gym?” But no. You’d be thinking of Florida, Jersey with alligators and more permissive firearms laws, a geographic misfit that shares more cultural DNA with the crass and aggressive North than the ambling genteel South. Connecticut is not some Sideways Jersey that missed out on Springsteen and an MTV serial. Connecticut is just Connecticut. New England flyover country if New England were big enough to fly over, an in-between place that lacks the coastal drama and urban swag of Mass and the high-peaks snow country mystery of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. That’s not to say that Connecticut has nothing in common with its neighbors. Just like New York, it is known for fantastically over-rated and borderline edible pizza. Just like New Jersey, it hides pockets of hedgefund estates and Ivy League exceptionalism. Just like Mass, leftover sentiments from the witch-burning era occasionally complicate alcohol purchases. And just like all three of those places, the acquisition of a driver’s license before operating a motor vehicle appears to be not only optional, but highly discouraged.

One more thing New England’s flyover state has in common with its neighbors: it has ski areas. Five of them, all with chairlifts: Sundown, Mohawk, Mount Southington, Powder Ridge, and (private) Lakeridge.