Magic Mountain, Vermont, Surrounded by Epic & Ikon, Posts "Record-Breaking Season"
Tap the brakes. The ski world is round and we're not sailing off the edge anytime soon.
For whatever reason the most transparent and consistent ski area newsletters tend to come out of New England. Win Smith penned the stellar Win’s Word for years as Sugarbush president. More recently, Erik Mogensen’s Letters from the GM have repositioned Black Mountain, New Hampshire from an oh-that-place-is-still-open-I-went-there-in-1985 curiosity to a banging New England party scene with the longest ski season in New Hampshire. But the longest-running current email newsletter series is Alpine Update from Geoff Hatheway, the straight-six never-quit engine behind the decade-long comeback of Magic Mountain, Vermont.
Hatheway’s emails, like mine, tend to be longer than is strictly necessary. So when his April 3 edition referenced Magic’s “record breaking 25/26 ski season” without providing details, I reached out to see if he was playing guard-the-numbers ski-operator chess or had more to share. Unsurprisingly, he had more to share:
“Despite less than average snowfall here this winter, Magic had another record-breaking year (2nd year in a row) in terms of: overall paid skier visits (+9%), day tickets (includes Indy) +16%, pass sales (+9%), and overall revenue (+8%, which does not include delayed revenue from Indy payout that comes after the season ends—Indy redemptions +24%).”
That’s incredible when you consider Magic’s neighborhood. The ski area sits within an hour of Stratton (Ikon), Killington (Ikon), Mount Snow (Epic), and Okemo (Epic). All are larger and taller. They spin 23 detachable chairlifts between them, including 10 of Vermont’s 11 public six-packs. Vail’s Epic Local Pass (currently $809) acts as an unlimited season pass at Mount Snow and Okemo, and, depending on when you buy it, is often less expensive than Magic’s season pass (for non-Vermonters), currently priced at $789.
How is it possible that such a ski area, with its fixed-grip lift fleet and four-days-per-week operating schedule and history of going broke and falling apart, is posting record business results as Colorado-based ownership and pass products embed themselves ever further into local and national ski culture? Isn’t it common knowledge that Epic and Ikon and Vail and Alterra are killing local skiing? Isn’t this Wal-Mart-comes-for-downtowns-and-then-e-commerce-comes-for-Wal-Mart savage capitalism at work on snow?
I’ve yet to be convinced, mostly because I keep writing stories about small ski areas that are doing just fine - and in many cases historically way better than fine - as national pass products rewire the skiing public’s experience and expectations. Magic is actually doing far better now, when it has corporate skiing as a foil, than it was from 1991 to 1997, when it sat dormant while vultures stripped its chairlifts. The Godzilla duopoly has always been a lazy narrative, mostly because it doesn’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny outside of raging social media anecdote by people whose entire identity is based on having skied 150 days per year at the same ski area since 1972 and Fellas in the good old days we’d punch a tourist right in the face if they asked us where we stored the moguls in the summertime.
Still, this small-ski-areas-thriving story is not the one I expected when Vail and Alterra began stacking Ocean’s 11 all-star rosters a decade-ish ago. But it turns out that story trumps stats, and Magic, under Master Marketer Hatheway, is telling a compelling story. “More soul,” reads the banner pinned to Magic’s website. Well that’s hard to quantify, but you can get away with big claims when they’re stapled to tangible things. Hatheway attributes the record 2025-26 winter to the new-used base-to-summit Black quad that went live a few years ago and daily lift ticket limits, which provide, he says, a “less-crowded experience… especially on peak Saturdays and big holiday weekends.”
My own from-a-distance take, as I’ve documented similar dynamics solidify among ski area clusters across the country, is that we long ago exited the era of the easy ski area victim. Most functioning public ski areas in the country - at least anyone with a chairlift - are hardened, fortified survivors, who have, over generations, endured, among other disruptions: bad winters; evolving skier expectations that demanded ever-better snow coverage, grooming, chairlifts, and trail variety, including elaborate and ever-changing terrain parks; a meta-culture more deliberately oriented around kids’ (non-skiing) sports and activities; deep shifts in the labor and energy markets; and, most recently, the 2020 Covid shutdowns, the 2020-21 adaptations to that circumscribed world, and a sudden mandatory shift from analogue ticketing and marketing to digital. With substantive new ski areas nearly impossible to build and social media’s egalitarian communications network to broadcast from, small ski areas today have significant advantages over the small ski areas that failed by the hundreds in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
Oddly, one of the strongest cultural forces working against Magic’s long-term success has nothing to do with Big Ski: brand confusion with Six Flags Magic Mountain in California and Magic Mountain ski area in Idaho make Googling Magic a chore. This, per conversations with reps from both ski areas and attempts to wrangle Google toward the correct website, is a real problem that occasionally leads to skiers, say, buying tickets for tubing at Magic Mountain, which is offered in Idaho but not Vermont. Kind of a bummer, that drive between. Sign up for Magic Mountain, Vermont’s Alpine Updates here.