MCP Confirms Expansions at Purgatory, Lee Canyon; Stable Prices on 2026-27 Power Passes
Power Pass buddy passes now half off; upgrades also inbound for Pajarito, Valle Nevado, La Parva
Mountain Capital Partners, owner of 11 active ski areas in America and Chile, announced details of its 2026-27 Power Pass suite yesterday, along with a major expansion at Lee Canyon, Nevada; the completion of a stalled expansion at Purgatory, Colorado; a large snowmaking upgrade at Pajarito, New Mexico; and lift and other infrastructure projects at its Chilean ski areas.
The headliner here is the Lee Canyon expansion, which an MCP representative confirmed is the long-teased Chair 8 outlined on the ski area’s U.S. Forest Service masterplan:
For context, the Lift 8 pod will slide looker’s right of Lee Canyon’s current trail network, intersecting with the Bluebird pod:
Language in a past version of Lee Canyon’s MDP details the expansion:
Chair 8 would be a step up in difficulty from Chair 5 [Ponderosa], accessing mostly intermediate runs with some easier and some more difficult terrain within that category. It would be a fixed-grip quad chairlift with a capacity of 1,800 pph, 2,200 feet long, with a vertical rise of 650 feet. It would be a bottom drive lift with approximately 16 towers.
It’s a short but significant terrain expansion for what is becoming a very constrained ski area near (technically within the city bounds of) rapidly growing Las Vegas, and it will be the second new chairlift MCP installed since purchasing Lee Canyon from Powdr in 2023. Still, Lee Canyon may have more untapped terrain potential than any ski area in the country, with 1,919 vertical feet of hike-to terrain towering above its 860-foot lift-served vertical drop (the current masterplan has no plans for lift-served expansion upward).
MCP will also complete its Gelande lift and small expansion at Purgatory:
Purgatory detailed the expansion in an announcement last spring:
This addition will greatly improve our guests’ experience by creating a new way to access the top of the mountain without requiring access through the Columbine or Village base areas while adding to the advanced and expert terrain offered on the frontside of the mountain.
The construction of this new fixed grip triple chairlift manufactured by Skytrac and development of a network of up to five (5) new trails and trail connectors will be a substantial undertaking, requiring significant resources and manpower.
Unfortunately, a permitting issue - now presumably resolved - stalled the project to summer 2026.
MCP reps said that Pajarito’s snowmaking upgrade would amount to a 50 percent increase in the mountain’s capacity, with “major upgrades to pumping systems and electrical distribution for snowmaking. Water will come from a new pipeline that is part of the Jemez Mountain Regional Fire Protection Project, a public-private partnership with Los Alamos County and the state of New Mexico that will also support regional fire protection through a 10-million-gallon reservoir.”
Valle Nevado and La Parva ski areas will modernize several lifts. MCP provided these details to The Storm:
La Parva Lifts
Tortolas - Full motor rebuild for primary and aux motors
Alpha - New haul rope
Vegas - New haul rope
Aguilas - Electronics Interface Modernization
Valle Nevado Lifts
Gondola - New Drive and Electronics Modernization
Andes - Controls Upgrade
Prado - New Control and Drive
These upgrades will complement “expanded snowmaking, along with other significant upgrades to create one of the largest seamless skiable domains in the Andes,” according to an MCP press release.
MCP announced the purchase of El Colorado - which is part of that “seamless skiable domain” along with Valle and La Parva - and three sister ski areas last summer, but is still awaiting regulatory approval, according to MCP representatives.
Prices for Mountain Capital Partners’ 2026-27 Power Pass suite, which provides access to their 11 active owned ski areas in Chile and the western United States, will remain unchanged for the fourth consecutive year. Kids 12 and under are again eligible for a free unlimited Power Pass. Each pass now includes six buddy tickets at half-off the online rate:
Access tiers across the company’s owned mountains also remains stable, with 10 shared days between La Parva and Valle Nevado for Power Pass and Power Pass Select holders. Independent Monarch will again partner with Power Pass, but longtime independent partners Loveland and Sundance have yet to confirm 2026-27 participation:
Has the Ropetow Revolution arrived in the East?
I don’t know how much Boyne Resorts paid for its eight-packs, but my educated guess is between $15 and $30 million each for the five machines built across four ski areas between 2018 (when prices were certainly lower) and 2024. These mega-lifts, according to Lift Blog, are capable of moving between 2,770 (Madison 8 at Big Sky), and 3,600 (Ramcharger 8, also at Big Sky) skiers per hour.
That sounds like a lot of skiers, and it is. Big Sky’s rocketship tram, which moves an astonishing 2,135 vertical feet in 2.6 minutes, moves just 850 skiers per hour (though the mountain intentionally limits skier capacity up to constrained Lone Peak).
Which is why I was shocked when Rick Schmitz gave me his estimate that the high-speed ropetows he’s installed at his three small Wisconsin ski areas could move 4,000 or more skiers per hour, and cost a fraction of the price of a chairlift to build.
“Ropetows are the best uphill transportation for the Midwest, period,” Schmitz told me on the podcast in 2022, explaining why he replaced a Hall double chair at 183-vertical-foot Crystal Ridge (then Rock Snowpark) with a ropetow in 2019. “Terrain park riders prefer ropetow, especially in the Midwest where our runs are short. They don’t have to unstrap, for the boarders. They can get so many laps in. … It’s inexpensive to build. We build them in-house. We design them in-house. And it moves people extremely efficiently and the riders love it.”