Silver Star, Grouse Mountain in B.C. & Butternut, Mass. Join Ikon Pass 2-Day Tier
No access on Base or Session passes, and holiday blackouts will apply
Hi! Nice to see you. Where have I been, you ask? Well, Friend, I’ve been fighting to the death with my old pal Covid for the past eight or nine days. So far I’m winning, but it’s keeping me from doing other things, like my job. Sorry about that. Have a pleasant day and wish me luck with this whole not-dying thing. Talk soon. Peace and Taco Bell to you and yours. Sincerely, Stu.
ps if I owe you an email/text/DM/call/fantasy football dues/explanation for that one night in ‘97, it’s coming but don’t be afraid to send me a follow-up message that says “hey jerk talk to me.”
Here’s an approximate reconstruction of a conversation between me and an Alterra executive earlier this year:
Stu: Why did Jiminy Peak, Cranmore, Wild Mountain, and Buck Hill join this weird new two-day Ikon Pass tier for the 2025-26 winter?
Alterra Executive: Oh, those mountains didn’t join the Ikon Pass.
S: But passholders get two days at each mountain with their Ikon Pass, right?
AE: Yes. Those two days are a perk, like the 14 pounds of stickers that we mail with each Ikon Pass.
S: So the “perk,” then, is a new two-day tier for certain mountains just for full Ikon Pass holders?
AE: No, it’s not a new two-day tier, because these mountains are not on the Ikon Pass.
S: OK, let me get this straight: a skier can present their Ikon Pass to personnel at any of these four ski areas and receive a lift ticket, with which the passholder can then load all the ski lifts and ski down all the ski trails?
AE: Yes.
S: But even though a skier can use their Ikon Pass to ski at them, these ski areas are not on the Ikon Pass?
AE: Correct.
Got that? Me neither. So I just pretended the exchange never happened and wrote this:
But this past week, Ikon added three more of these “bonus mountains” for the 2025-26 winter. So, just to be sure that I hadn’t, like, accidentally been on shrooms and imagined that whole weird exchange about ski areas accessible with the Ikon Pass not being part of the Ikon Pass, I again asked Alterra PR if these three new mountains that skiers could access with their Ikon Pass had joined the Ikon Pass. This is what they provided (well the part in quotes):
“Bonus Mountains are not Ikon Pass partner destinations, but rather one of many Ikon Pass Peak Perks that give pass holders more places to ski/ride, additional value and benefits throughout the ski season. Bonus Mountains are also able to offer a perk to their own pass holders – a discounted Ikon Session Pass 3-Day – which is a win-win for smaller mountain markets.”
Yours Truly,
Alterra Mountain Company
So I did what I often do when the ski industry does things such as tell us that separate and distinct ski areas are in fact one ski area or that the only problem with $300 lift tickets is that people get mad about them – I ignored them and categorized pass-to-resort relationships in ways that match the lived skier experience. In defining the relationship between Ikon and its two-day mountains, this is pretty simple: does purchasing the Ikon Pass grant a passholder lift tickets to ski areas X, Y, and Z? Since the answer is clearly “yes,” then these mountains are clearly part of the Ikon Pass roster.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the new two-day Ikon Pass mountains: Powdr-owned Silver Star, British Columbia; Grouse Mountain (which I can never remember the name of; for some reason I keep wanting to write “Partridge Mountain”), also in B.C.; and little Butternut, Massachusetts. That makes seven North American ski areas on Ikon’s two-day tier. The mountains are available only on the full Ikon Pass, and are subject to holiday blackouts. Here’s the list:
And here’s Ikon’s full 2025-26 Roster. Alterra has been crushing the partner game this offseason, adding Ischgl, Austria; Le Massif de Charlevoix, Quebec; and Valle d’Aosta, Italy as five-or-seven-day partners:
The new two-day non-partner partners are all great additions. Butternut is a top-of-the-line family-owned thousand-footer with a flotilla of new quads perched easy daytrip distance from NYC (Boston skiers will generally head north, to the larger White Mountains, rather than west, to the Berkshires). Quail Mountain… wait, what was it again… Grouse Mountain sits near longtime Ikon partner Cypress, an easy drive (like, just a few minutes) from North Vancouver, with those gorgeous ever-sea views off the summit. And Silver Star is a Powdr-owned B.C. monster sprawling over 3,200 acres. It has long been Powdr’s only large destination resort to snub Ikon, and it’s curious that the operator would clip it to the megapass now, after putting Silver Star up for sale last year.
I checked in with Powdr on this. The Ikon partnership “has nothing to do with the sale,” Powdr VP of Communications Stacey Hutchinson confirmed to The Storm via text message. “The sales process is still moving.”
Let’s take a deeper look at Ikon’s new two-day non-partner partners and what they bring to passholders, and examine the implications of Alterra’s new partner tier more broadly: