Powder Mountain, Mount Bohemia, and the Future of Passholder-Only Weekends
“I think this is the future of the ski industry more than people realize" - Mount Bohemia owner Lonie Glieberman.
I think we’re supposed to be all pissed off about this
Powder Mountain has made some curious decisions in its pivot toward being publicly partially private or privately partially public or whatever. The mountain has designated three lifts for homeowners only, but two of them – the Mary’s and Village quads – serve small pockets of unremarkable terrain, making this exclusivity questionable in value. The decision to charge $12 for weekend parking seems like a financially insignificant way to beg for social media hand grenades. The whole transition of whatever Pow Mow was to whatever it wants to be has been opaque, haphazard, and confusing.
But the ski area’s announcement last week that February weekends would be for season passholders only is an oddly timed, bad-sounding idea that is probably a good idea in practice.
Weekends are the most convenient times for most people, especially the miniature ones, to ski. That generally makes Saturday and Sunday the least enjoyable days to be out there – at least if you plan on doing anything like riding a chairlift, parking your car, or eating. Other than that, busy-day skiing is great. Except oh yeah the skiing itself is also like playing dodgeball in a locust swarm.
The weekend/holiday timeframe has become particularly unpleasant in Utah, where the proliferation of cheap multimountain passes, an exploding population, an ever-improving airport, and God’s decision to park one of planet Earth’s greatest snowtraps directly adjacent to a city of 1.2 million exacerbates typical weekend ski area pressures. Utah, a state with just 15 public, chairlift-served ski areas, averaged nearly 2 million more skier visits over the past six seasons than it did in the six seasons prior:
Utah operators have done all sorts of things to manage these swarms: raise lift ticket prices, raise season pass prices, charge for parking, limit day-ticket sales, build bigger lifts, install an eight-mile-long access road/escape room/obstacle course filled with avalanche paths and thousands of other vehicles to discourage commuters (actually that last one is just driving up SR-210 to Alta and Snowbird). None of these mitigation efforts has really done anything to push back the skier tidal wave:
So Pow Mow is offering an alternative to fighting your way up the Cottonwoods like Union infantry storming a mountaintop bunker: every weekend day in February, the mountain will be open exclusively for season passholders.
It’s not an original idea. Mount Bohemia, the remote and feisty experts-only bump parked at the tip-top of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, began restricting Saturdays to season passholders a couple of years ago.
“On a Saturday powder day, our lift ticket sales would go through the roof,” Bohemia owner Lonie Glieberman told me on Sunday. “We’d have 40-minute lift lines because Joe Smith decides to come on the best day of the year. It was really punishing our best customers, who bought early.”
Fencing the mountain off for passholders fixed the crowding problems immediately, Glieberman said, while building goodwill among Bohemia’s substantial season passholder base. “It shows season passholders that they’re special,” he said.
The change was also good for Bohemia’s business, nudging holdouts who may have waited for snow to buy a lift ticket to instead snag a season pass in advance, Glieberman said. Glieberman likened Bohemia to football stadiums, which host just a handful of games, some far more desirable than others. “People know they can’t just walk up to the Michigan Wolverines stadium on the day of the Ohio State game and buy a ticket – they buy a season pass that includes opponents like Western Michigan and Purdue, to guarantee they have access on that one day,” Glieberman said.
Glieberman said he’s gotten little if any pushback on the Saturday access change. Passholders like it, and holdouts understand it, he said. “I think this is the future of the ski industry more than people realize,” Glieberman said.
Bohemia, of course, is a special case. The mountain’s season pass costs just $109 ($147 with fees). A no-Saturdays version sells for $99 ($137 with fees). A single-day lift ticket – for any age, on any day – is $95. Incentive to purchase the season pass – which the mountain only offers for an 11-day window around Thanksgiving – is strong. Boho is also one of the most unique ski areas in North America, a sprawling experts-only playground with no grooming and no snowmaking, marooned 250 miles from the closest interstate exit.
Powder Mountain’s adult season pass runs $1,649. That’s not terribly out of line for Utah, but nearly every other resort’s pass either is an Epic or Ikon pass, includes reciprocal days at other ski areas, or provides the option to purchase a multimountain pass at a discount. Pow Mow ditched its reciprocal partners a few years back, and will leave the Indy Pass for the 2024-25 ski season. Your Pow Mow pass is good at Pow Mow and nowhere else – what can the resort give passholders instead? A mountain to themselves is a compelling perk.
That perk will make Pow Mow, a ski area with scale and pass pricing similar to other large western resorts, into a laboratory that other operators can study. One of the easiest ways for Vail and Alterra to scrub incessant criticism of their $299-plus day tickets would be to simply stop selling them. Like, sorry, Saturdays are for Epic/Ikon passholders (and in the case of partner resorts, season passholders) only. Resorts with congested access corridors – Palisades Tahoe, Northstar, the Cottonwoods, Crystal in Washington, Stevens Pass, Stowe, Summit County in Colorado – would be logical starting points for such restrictions. (It’s unclear whether such restrictions would violate the Forest Service leases under which most large western ski areas operate, but many large ski areas already restrict the number of day tickets they’ll sell; Powder Mountain operates on private land.)
Ski area policies that curtail peak-time access or add congestion fees (like paid parking) tend to spark fits of populist indignation. Like “oh great now skiing is just for people who wear tuxedos to breakfast and hire butlers for their dogs.” But on-the-ground realities expose the hallowness of the rebellion. Families who plan ahead even a little bit can score all kinds of discounted Epic, Ikon, and Indy passes. And sitting in the shadow of every Vail Mountain in America is a Ski Cooper – a good-enough ski area with throwback infrastructure and throwback lift ticket rates. For Pow Mow, that ski area is Nordic Valley, where single-day lift tickets start at $9. While Nordic is no Powder Mountain, it’s a decent little ski area, with a 1,700-foot-vertical drop, 450 skiable acres, a brand-new high-speed six-pack, 300 inches of annual snowfall, and an address 10 minutes closer to Ogden than Pow Mow.
Utah skiing is in a weird spot. The best snow is here. Some of America’s best mountains are here. You can practically step out of the airport and onto a chairlift. These are good things. But they’re not secret things. Epic is here. Ikon is here. The Olympics are coming back. Everyone wants to ski in Utah. But everyone can’t do so at the exact same time. How to solve this puzzle? Part of the answer is to build more skiing: the new-ish Cherry Peak and Woodward Park City, Deer Valley’s massive expansion, proposed expansions at Nordic Valley and Brian Head. But part of the solution will also be to experiment with access tiers and price points. Pow Mow’s passholders-only weekends could become an important tool in the Fight for a Better Ski Day, or the concept could fizzle after a season or two.
Pow Mow did commit one classic mistake here: announcing an access change policy in October, well after many people had already made their winter plans on the assumption that they would be able to purchase lift tickets down the road. This includes not only skiers who booked through Pow Mow’s lodging partners, but guests of homeowners who planned to stay over for the weekend. Powder Mountain officials did not immediately respond to inquires as to whether they would offer a workaround for these groups.
This article is dumb and it’s why we need ski media
The publication: The Inertia, a site mostly focused on recreation involving skateboard-shaped equipment that is not skateboards, such as surf boards and snowboards.
The headline: Montana Snowbowl Resort and the Death of the Local Town Mountain
The reason I’m writing about it: because I appear to know more about snosportskiing than the author, who writes good but makes some mistakes in this story.