Isn’t it cool and weird, and potentially winter-changing?” Then you either shrug your shoulders and say “Brah I never ski anything smaller than Everest,” or realize that Vail is charging about the same price for seven days at a trio of New England legends as it is for a single day of walk-up skiing at its marquee Colorado properties. That’s about as far as I can take you with the math – my whole point here is saying, “Hey this exists. Everyone else just blacks out the three big holiday periods of Christmas and MLK and Presidents’ weekend (Vail, bizarrely, throws in Thanksgiving, a weekend that, outside of Killington, has never busy in the Northeast in living memory). Of the prominent pass products, only Indy Pass has begun seriously reckoning with Saturdays, which are like weekly re-stagings of an apocalyptic interstellar invasion at pretty much any North American ski hill. The Day Pass, it’s worth pointing out, includes weekends. Both are phenomenal deals, so it comes down to how much you’re actually going to ski, and when you want to do it. If you’re still with me, your New Hampshire options are now this: the $385 Northeast Midweek pass or the lowest-priced Epic Day Pass. If you’re really looking to get after it, stop reading now – you’ve found your skeleton key to a kick-ass season. The Northeast-specific pass is an incredible value, and also includes unlimited access to every other Pennsylvania and Ohio ski area in the chart above, plus Brighton and holiday-restricted access to Hunter, Mount Snow, and Okemo, and 10 days at Stowe. The lowest-priced Epic Pass that includes unlimited access to all four New Hampshire mountains is the $514 Northeast Value pass (the $841 Epic and $626 Epic Local passes also include unlimited New Hampshire, as well as extensive access to the western skyscrapers upon which Vail built its empire – I’ve broken down all the options here ). So let’s have a look around at our other options. We can always quibble with lists.īut however we got here, here we are. It skis more like a really big Massachusetts hill than a relatively small New Hampshire one. Statistically, it’s a New Hampshire outlier. Crotched – maybe Crotched belongs on this list. Sunapee and Attitash are sprawling and gorgeous, each skiing far larger than its advertised acreage. Wildcat is a New England icon, slotted alongside Cannon in the state’s Radness-of- Terrain Index. Every other ski area on this bargain Epic Day Pass is small, busy, urban-adjacent, practically snowless – with a few exceptions that you can see for yourself, such as Alpine Valley’s odd snowiness (thank its position near Lake Eerie). Like the dealership ran out of flatscreens so they threw in a free F-150 when you bought your Escape. Like the time I was at a New York comedy club scrub show and Tracy Morgan showed up to do a set. The inclusion of New Hampshire on this roster is just weird, like getting an iPhone in a box of Lucky Charms. Here’s a full breakdown of blackout and no-blackout versions, with prices by number of days purchased, along with a list of all resorts included in this tier: That’s the blacked-out version, but an upgrade to the holiday-inclusive version is just a few dollars more: $52 for one day ($26 for kids), $310 for seven days ($157 for kids). For kids, the prices are even more ropetow rinky-dink: $22 for one day, $132 – $18.85 per day – for seven. The per-day prices, offered in increments from one day to seven, summon the ‘90s: $44 for one off-peak day, $260 for seven days – $37.14 per day. I’ll get to all that.īut what I want to analyze today is this: the insane value of Vail Resorts’ recently introduced but little-discussed discount 22-Resort Epic Day Pass product, which all four New Hampshire mountains are party to. Fridays or whether Sunapee ought to join Stowe and Mount Snow in the paid parking game to quell peak-day traffic. Whether Wildcat will ever be Wildcat again or whether Attitash can run more than 50 percent of its lifts more than 50 percent of the time or whether Crotched will return to its seven-day schedule and party mountain-aura with its 3 a.m. Let’s set aside, for now, whether these prices are a good idea, whether Vail understands the significance of its New Hampshire mountains, whether we are past the settling-in point and to the demanding-answers portion of the ownership curve.
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