MCP’s Power Pass, Still Free for Kids 12 and Under, Launches for 2025-26
Zero dollars is a pretty good deal for skiing
Utah unguided
It’s surreal but I do it all the time. Delta’s 7 a.m. out of JFK and I’m walking the jetway at SLC by 10:15, sometimes earlier. Barring some weather catastrophe I’m on the bump before noon, a half day of America’s best skiing despite waking up in my Brooklyn bedroom.
Last Monday I followed this industrial/timezone miracle route up Interstate 15 to Nordic Valley. If you’re not from Utah and you’ve skied a lot in Utah, this is the mountain you probably haven’t been to. Nordic Valley is not on the Epic or Ikon Passes. It’s not snow-drowned like the Cottonwoods or mining-town adjacent like Park City and Deer Valley. It doesn’t soar like Snowbasin or sprawl like Pow Mow. Its 5,365-foot base area is the lowest of any chairlift-served ski area in Utah. The out-of-base chairlift is a 55-year-old Hall double that spent the winter of 2023-24 on vacation. Last year, Nordic Valley’s lodge burned down. Whatever you came to Utah for, this isn’t it. If you’ve seen the place at all, it was probably peering southwest off Powder Mountain’s Sundown summit at the white spiderweb etched across the valley. “What is that?” you may have said. And probably whoever you were with said “Brah IDK. Jackson Tahoe maybe?”
But ask anyone who grew up nearby about Nordic Valley, and they will give you a clear answer. Something like rapture. They learned to ski there. Or took their kids to ski there. Or they hope people still ski there. In Utah’s impossible snowy sky kingdom floating above the Great Salt Lake, Nordic Valley is like the public bus rolling through Beverly Hills, there to make sure that everyone, no matter who they are, can get around.
This has always been true. But Utah skiing was not always so busy and expensive. Before Epkon, you could buy discounted day tickets to any of the major ski areas at local ski shops or grocery stores. Skiers could often redeem their same-day boarding pass for a half-day lift ticket. All that’s gone now. Buy some version of a resort season pass or Epkon pass early, or stare down an $800-plus ski day for a family of four.
Except at Nordic Valley. Because at Nordic Valley, kids 12 and under ski free. Always. Mountain Capital Partners (MCP), which purchased the ski area in 2018, started tossing out kids Power Passes like parade candy several years ago. It’s good for unlimited access at all 11 of MCP’s ski areas. There is no adult purchase required. There is no convenience fee or media surcharge. You just say “Give my kid a Power Pass” and MCP says “OK here you go.”
The results, in an anecdote: Google Maps routed me off the interstate and up some cracked country winder. Nordic Valley hung over the landscape like something drawn, a scribble of antique chairlifts and wide-hacked trails. In the 50-degree Monday sunshine I expected desolation, but the parking lots overflowed and kids traced screeching arcs across the front face. MCP fixed Apollo last summer, and a sparkling six-pack serves a huge 2020 expansion, but a beginner-area triple chair corralled 75 percent of the resort’s skiers. It was a local school holiday. Something random. Something you don’t plan fixings-with-grandma for. So kids and parents, needing Something To Do, had found it here (adult lift tickets that day maxed out under $30).
If this bargain version of skiing sounds appealing, here is a way to craft a winter around it: today, MCP released its 2025-26 Power Pass suite. The prices are unchanged from last year’s, which were unchanged from the year before:
Here’s the roster:
In past years, the full Power Pass has also included three days at Loveland, Colorado and Sundance, Utah. An MCP representative indicated that the company was “working on” renewing those partnerships, but that they were “TBD” as of yesterday.
With unlimited access to nine western mountains and 10 days at the company’s Chilean boomtown, the Power Pass is one of the best regional ski passes in America. Consider the $0 cost for kids – with no adult pass purchase required – and it may be the only way some families ski next winter. Let’s take a deeper look at this minor megapass and how it stacks up to its biggest competitors: