Snow Triple Play's 16-Mountain Debut Roster, Examined
A compelling core lineup along the NYC-to-Montreal axis
There is probably no better ski area to build a multimountain pass around than Big Snow. Skiing’s greatest billboard, the indoor speedbump shares a parking lot with two NFL teams and rises over Interstate 95. Everyone knows it’s there, and the experience is cheap and easy when they decide to try it. But where to go next? Mountain Creek, owned by Big Snow operator Snow Partners, sits just an hour north if traffic cooperates. But Mountain Creek is surprisingly large, steep, and confusing for a New Jersey ski area. Surely there is a nearby outdoor ski center where you don’t have to park across the highway and ride to the summit standing in a bucket?
There is. There are. Lots of them. My favorite fun fact to share with the ski industry reps that descend on Manhattan each October is that approximately 200 ski areas sit within a six-hour drive of the city (well, if you leave at 4:00 a.m., drive fast, and don’t stop a lot). Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass, Alterra’s Ikon Pass, and Indy Pass have already claimed around 60 percent of the chairlift-served ski areas among that group. Could there be room in the marketplace for a fourth multimountain pass product?
I didn’t think so. But then Snow Partners fused the company’s two secret weapons – the singular Big Snow, a 365-day-per-year operation seated in a 20-million-person metropolitan region, and strong industrywide relationships built via the company’s Terrain Based Learning program and Snow Cloud resort operating software – to build a 16-resort menu for the 2025-26 rollout of its Snow Triple Play (STP) product:
The raw stats look fine laid out on that grid, and Whiteface and Gore could anchor any Northeast pass product. But the ski areas as a network really start to make sense when we line them up on a map:
That looks like something AI might spit out if you asked it to build a ski pass along the major transportation corridor between New York City and Montreal. Combine that local network with Mountain Collective’s international destination web, as the two products did in a recent discount partnership, and you have a blueprint for a very adventurous winter.
To an extent. Snow Triple Play’s buzzkill is in the “triple,” as in three total days of skiing, with a max of two at any one ski area. It’s not the product’s only limitation. As I wrote a couple weeks back:
Snow Triple Play is a work in progress. Given its focus on the mostly-still-day-ticket-sane East, large number of blackouts (especially at Belleayre and Gore), advanced reservation requirements at certain resorts (Plattekill, Oak), lack of age-group or number-of-days options, and clunky find-some-specific-office redemption requirements (Butternut, Pleasant), the product is neither a screaming bargain [Mountain Creek’s own Triple Play costs about half what the Snow Triple Play does] nor a seamless, buy-it-and-ski-onto-the-lift product like Ikon. In a vacuum, the Snow Triple is great. Lined up beside today’s fierce national unlimited and day-pass options, it’s just OK. …
Skiers have been trained to expect more than a take-it-or-leave-it three days with a whole bunch of weird restrictions and blackouts. Snow Partners CEO Joe Hession said, quite adamantly, that “we’ll never add more days” when he joined me on the podcast shortly after Snow Triple’s launch. But this is a strong network of mountains to start with, and if Snow Triple is going to find a place in the highly selective, richly populated modern ski-pass quiver, it may need to evolve into something bigger.
Still, with Indy Pass off sale and the best prices on Epic and Ikon long gone, Snow Triple offers a compelling add-on or starter product for skiers along the Deegan New York Thruway Northway Interstate 87 corridor (Dear God why do you East Coast people insist on naming your highways like house pets, and why do the names have to change every 10 exits?). So it’s worth examining the roster more in-depth to see what that $200-ish ($199.99, plus 5 percent “credit and processing”) gets you.
We’ll examine these in four buckets: NYC local (Big Snow, Mountain Creek, Belleayre, Plattekill, Butternut, Southington), Montreal local (the four Sommet ski areas), the Destination Center (Gore and Whiteface, with an Oak Mountain sidekick), and the outliers (Kissing Bridge, Pleasant, and Martock).