The Indy Pass Wants to Take On Epic and Ikon

Doug Fish (left) and Erik Mogensen ride the lift at Mission Ridge Ski and Board Resort in Wenatchee, Washington.

(Photo: Shane Wilder)

Can the Indy Pass Save Skiing from the Ikon and Epic Pass Hordes?

Published: Dec 13, 2023

Everybody’s buzzing about this affordable passport to smaller, often overlooked ski resorts around the U.S. Its owners think their rapidly growing business could be the antidote to the ski industry’s endless consolidation.

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is stoked.

He’s almost always stoked—he even signs his emails “Stay stoked, Doug.” But today he is especially stoked, because we’re skiing a foot of freshly fallen snow at one of his favorite resorts, Utah’s Powder Mountain. I follow Fish through a line of evergreens onto a wide-open, nearly untracked slope, making effortless turns all the way down.

“Best run of the year!” he says at the bottom, giddy and out of breath. The other two in our foursome agree: Kevin Mitchell, the general manager of Powder Mountain, and a guy named Erik who has tagged along. Apparently, he’s some sort of tech entrepreneur. “That was like heli-skiing!” Erik exclaims as we wait for a shuttle to drive us back up the mountain.

At the top, Mitchell peels off and heads back to work. Erik also vanishes, leaving me with Fish. “Another lap?” he asks. Obviously. We’re supposed to be doing an interview, but that would kill the stoke. Later I’ll learn why Fish has millions of reasons to be stoked today, but for now there’s pow to be shredded.

Doug Fish is 67, with a wavy-gravy mane of white hair and a matching beard. A long-time ski-industry marketing guy, he’s also the founder of something called the Indy Pass, an unconventional alliance of small, independent resorts that has unexpectedly become the hottest ticket in skiing.

The Indy Pass entitles holders to ski two days at each of more than 180 smaller resorts. Launched in 2019, the pass initially cost $199 for adults and $99 for kids. A family of four could ski all season for less than the cost of a single Epic or Ikon Pass, the “megapasses” offered by Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company, respectively, the two corporate giants that dominate the ski-resort industry. “We’re kind of the opposite of Vail,” Doug tells me, understating the point considerably.

The Indy Pass is aimed at skiers who aren’t interested in racking up 30-day seasons at ultra-expensive, big-name resorts like Vail or Deer Valley. They don’t need to be whisked uphill on high-speed chairlifts to ski wide, groomed runs with more traffic than the New Jersey Turnpike. They just want to have fun on a pretty, un-crowded mountain.

The pass wasn’t terribly popular initially. The first winter, 2019–20, pass holders clocked all of 9,000 skier visits to the forty-some resorts on the pass. (Vail Resorts alone recorded nearly 13 million skier days that year.) But then two things happened: the pandemic hit, and everyone went skiing.

The following year, the COVID-19 winter of 2020–21, the big resorts on the Epic and Ikon passes got maxed out. Images of serpentine lift lines and miles-long traffic jams filled social media. Staffing shortages made a day on the slopes feel like flying Spirit Airlines, and savvy skiers began eyeing the smaller, quirkier resorts left behind by industry consolidation. Indy caught on. Pass sales grew tenfold, and dozens more resorts signed up. (I bought one for $259 in 2022, when Indy offered a discount to Epic and Ikon holders.) Fish started to think that his crazy startup might work.

The Indy business model is simple. When someone buys a pass—now priced at $399 for adults, $199 for kids—the money goes into a big pot. Show up at a partner resort to redeem one of your two ski days and that resort receives a percentage of its daily walk-up lift-ticket price, known as the yield, from the big pot of money. Indy pays out 85 percent of what it takes in back to the resorts, using the rest to cover overhead like credit-card-processing fees, staffing, and customer service.

It’s still a shoestring operation. “Right now our assets consist of four laptops and a Toyota 4Runner,” Fish tells me during a chairlift ride between powder runs.

As the day progresses, the wind picks up and we seek shelter in the trees. Despite his years, Fish keeps charging. “It might be steeper over here, let’s check it out!” he yells before disappearing into a gladed bowl. A few minutes later, I watch him bounce off a buried stump and cartwheel into several feet of powder. “I’m all right,” he says. “Maybe my knee.” The charging continues.

After a couple more runs, we head to the Powder Keg, a cozy on-mountain bar that’s buzzing. We find seats near a live band. A woman is dancing to “Lovely Day.” Everybody’s happy. We drink pilsners and relive the day. It’s skiing.

I drive home, still stoked.

A few days later, a press release pops into my email inbox, announcing that Fish has sold the entire Indy Pass operation to a company called Entabeni Systems. The latter is owned by a businessman named Erik Mogensen—the same Erik we’d been skiing with at Powder Mountain that day. So that’s why Fish was in Utah.

On the chairlift, Fish had let slip that he thought Indy Pass was “probably a $30 million business,” and hinted that he might cash out sooner rather than later. He meant very soon. But almost nobody outside the ski industry, and very few inside it, had ever heard of Erik Mogensen or Entabeni Systems. Who was this guy?

More important: What would become of the Indy Pass after the sale? Would it stay true to its roots, or turn into another Epic Pass? Back in ye olde early 2000s, Epic had also started out as a cheap, convenient alternative to the traditional single-resort pass. Was Indy Pass a revolution in skiing, or another corporate money grab?

To find out, I drove seven hours across Wyoming to meet Mogensen at a tiny little Indy Pass resort called Antelope Butte.

I’d never heard of Antelope Butte, and you probably haven’t either. Situated in the Bighorn Mountains, about 59 miles west of the town of Sheridan, the Butte itself is anything but big. There’s a new but spartan base lodge that opened last year, but when I pulled into the parking lot on a clear March afternoon, it was fronted by a wall of Porta-Potties. Not promising.

“We’re kind of the opposite of Vail.” —Doug Fish, founder of the Indy Pass

Parked next to the johns was an enormous black RV. Lettering on the hood identified it as Mega Bus One, and there was an Entabeni Systems logo on the side. This was Mogensen’s mobile office; he was at the end of a five-week road trip to various resorts across the West.

I knocked. A voice came from somewhere down around my feet.

“I’m down here! Under the bus!”

A wiry guy in his mid-thirties wriggled out from underneath Mega Bus One. He had a screwdriver in one hand and some kind of electronic part in the other. “I’m just trying to fix the solenoid in the leveler,” he explained. Oh.

“Want to go make some turns?” Yes, I did! And we were off, darting down the mountain’s narrow, East Coast–style trails and chasing locals into the glades.

I’d done my best to dig into Mogensen’s background but mostly came up empty. He had no social media presence, not even a LinkedIn profile. The Entabeni Systems website revealed only a corporate email address. Was this company for real?

It was: Entabeni provides point-of-sale and data-analysis services to a few dozen independent ski areas—emphatically not those affiliated with Vail Resorts, Alterra, or even Powdr Corporation, a second-tier player that owns Snowbird, Copper Mountain, Killington, and a few others. Entabeni also sells these services to Indy Pass.

Mogensen himself remained mysterious. He had plenty of money, somehow, and had started a few different companies, but I couldn’t locate corporate records, news articles, or lawsuits mentioning his name—the usual shrapnel produced in the pursuit of wealth. All I had found was an old YouTube video of him and a friend lighting a Christmas tree—as in literally lighting it on fire, with a gas can, a 40-foot fuse, and a match. “He’s the Most Interesting Man in the World,” Travis Seeholzer, mountain operations manager of Utah’s Beaver Mountain, told me.

That night, over a glass of wine in the Mega Bus, Mogensen acknowledged that “I’m very hard to find,” and that he likes it that way. “Some of the best people I’ve ever met don’t have LinkedIn profiles,” he said.

Mogensen attributes his taste for secrecy to the mentorship he received over the years. “I had very wealthy people who gave me good advice early on—about how to build things, how to do things, and how not to be sued,” he said.

Steaks were sizzling in the oven; a slow cooker full of his wife’s mashed potatoes steamed on the counter. She freezes and then packs the Mega Bus full of them for these road trips.

While we ate, Mogensen told me his story. He grew up outside Buffalo, with middle-class parents, and began working as a ski instructor in his mid-teens. He did well enough in school that he got into a prestigious college with a full-ride scholarship, but left after a month. By then Mogensen had taught skiing and partied in Chamonix.

Ski instructing provided its own kind of education. One time at Stowe, he was riding a chairlift with a New York lawyer who took a business call and was frustrated because he had no way to time it and bill it. This was in the early iPhone days, and Mogensen, who had grown up fascinated by technology, wrote an app that would capture client info and billing time on all calls. The lawyer’s firm bought it; usage spread among other firms. Two or three versions later, Mogensen sold the app to LexisNexis, the legal-research and data company. He was a multimillionaire at 21.

He went through a few more ventures, the details of which are somewhat murky. He bought his app back, improved it, and then sold it again. He was in the welding business—something to do with pipelines and quality control. After that he had even more money. But he continued to teach skiing, his true passion.

That turned out to be perhaps his least successful pursuit. “I’ve been fired as a ski instructor by all three major ski-resort operators,” Mogensen told me somewhat proudly. His employers frowned on several of his quirks. Ski schools would book him for two types of private lessons: a P3, or three-hour, half-day lesson; or a P6, meaning a full day. He offered a third option as well. “I invented the P24,” he says, meaning a ski lesson that turns into a sleepover. That and other offenses eventually got him fired, but ski instructing was also how he met his wife, a corporate lawyer for a Denver-based firm. They live in Granby, not far from Winter Park, and her mashed potatoes are amazingly good.

Entabeni Systems was Mogensen’s way of taking his revenge against the big powers in the ski industry—not only for firing him, but for (in his view) ruining skiing. He thinks that the rapid consolidation of resorts has transformed skiing into an expensive, homogenized, too often inaccessible “product.”

Entabeni works with small ski areas, with the goal of improving efficiency and using data to learn about their customers—how often they visit, whether they take lessons or rent skis, whether they hang out and eat burgers—in the same way that the big companies track Epic and Ikon Pass users. The data services and hardware are free, but Entabeni gets a 2 percent cut of revenues. (Entabeni means “mountain” in Zulu; one of his key employees is from South Africa.)

That was the idea anyway. But it was a tough sell—until he met Doug Fish.

Skijoring at Wyoming’s Antelope Butte (Photo: Courtesy Indy Pass)

Fish was inspired to start Indy Pass after skiing at Montana’s Red Lodge Mountain, shown here in 2021. (Photo: Courtesy Indy Pass)

Fish conceived of the Indy Pass on a chairlift at Red Lodge Mountain, a funky, old-school ski hill in Montana. One day in February 2018, he rode up with an older couple who drove out from Minnesota every winter to ski four days. That’s it. Fish realized that the couple represented a whole category of skiers—millions, potentially—who were overlooked amid the industry’s evolution. They loved skiing. But they couldn’t afford $200 daily lift tickets, and they weren’t interested in buying an $800 or $1,000 megapass. Meanwhile, Fish knew that lots of smaller resorts were struggling. What if there was a pass that brought skiers like this couple to the tiny mountains that needed them?

That flash of inspiration turned into the Indy Pass. That spring, Fish and his business partner rented an RV and took a road trip around the West, trying to persuade ski areas to sign on. The first to say yes was Brundage, a medium-size resort near Boise, Idaho. Previously, groups of ski areas had tried to organize something similar—a common pass joining some quantity of independent mountains—but it had never quite worked. Indy Pass made it easy. “I said, That’s exactly what we need and what we’ve been trying to do,” recalls Ken Rider, the general manager at Brundage.

In the spring of 2019, when Fish had signed on ten resorts, he sent out a media release announcing the Indy Pass. Mogensen saw the news and flew to Portland the next day to meet Fish. He proposed that Entabeni handle the digital services that would make the pass work. At that point, Entabeni worked with just two resorts. Fish was interested, but he laid out some requirements. “I said, You need to create custom software for my pass, and it needs to do this and that, and it needs to be brutally simple so that a monkey can operate it at the ticket window,” he says. “And they did it!” These days, Entabeni counts around 45 ski resorts as clients, most of them Indy members.

As the pass has grown and added resorts, it’s proved ideal for northeastern skiers like Stuart Winchester, who lives in New York City with his wife and young daughter. As his daughter was growing up and learning to ski, Winchester would take her to mountains on his Ikon Pass, at places like Hunter Mountain in the Catskills. But the huge crowds made their days miserable, and he was reluctant to shell out yet more money to ski at resorts not affiliated with Ikon.

“The little off-the-radar places are where she tended to have the best time,” Winchester says. “The problem was that I’d have to lay down a lot of cash.” The Indy pass offered them an affordable way to ski at several different smaller mountains within a half-day’s drive of the city. “They filled that gap perfectly,” says Winchester, author of The Storm Skiing Journal, a blog and podcast.

This year, Indy added more than 50 new resorts, including ones in Europe, Japan, and Canada, plus several cross-country ski areas. “This thing is evolving into—it mostly already is—a true competitor to the Colorado-based megapasses,” Winchester wrote on his blog.

Mogensen’s acquisition rattled some Indy Pass customers. Would he transform it into a mid-market version of Epic and Ikon, turning smaller resorts into little versions of Beaver Creek? When the Epic Pass launched in 2008, it too seemed like a nice, affordable way to make skiing better.

Mogensen insists that Indy is not the new Ikon or Epic. “I think it’s going to be an equalizer,” he says. “We can’t continue to make skiing more and more exclusive. These big resorts have incredible experiences, but they’re increasingly expensive.”

He also sees Indy as a way to help small resorts. By bringing in more skiers and promoting small mountains, it boosts the bot-tom line of struggling places that might be tempted to sell to Vail or Alterra—or go bust.

“We have to fight for every customer we get,” says Geoff Hatheway, founder and president of Vermont’s Magic Mountain, which was rescued from near bankruptcy a few years ago. “Indy Pass does a great job of bringing people to us, and they have a great time and get a feel for what skiing can be.”

Hatheway estimates that Indy Pass holders account for 15 percent of Magic’s skier visits; Ken Rider says that only 3 percent of Brundage’s visitors are currently coming from Indy Pass.

The key difference between Indy and other passes is the two-day limit at each mountain. (You get a 25 percent discount on day three.) The pass further limits capacity at certain popular areas—like Powder Mountain, one of the biggest Indy resorts—with a complex system of blackout days and reservation requirements. These limitations prevent Indy from crowding beloved local resorts. As Mogensen puts it: “It’s not a true season pass.”

“We can’t continue to make skiing more and more exclusive. These big resorts have incredible experiences, but they’re increasingly expensive.” —Erik Mogensen, owner of Entabeni Systems and the Indy Pass

Indy is well suited for people who take skiing road trips, especially in the Northeast, where many ski areas are located within a short drive of one another. Skiers can make their way around Vermont and New Hampshire, from Magic Mountain to Cannon Mountain to powder mecca Jay Peak, and have themselves a lovely week of skiing.

It takes a little more driving, but one can also string together a decent week of skiing at Indy resorts in the Rockies. One mid-March day at Beaver Mountain in Utah, I met a dozen Indy skiers, including a music teacher from New England and a family from Wisconsin. “It puts us on the radar,” says Travis Seeholzer, Beaver’s mountain operations manager.

There’s a financial catch. The more days (or “redemptions”) skiers claim, the lower the yield for resorts. So if too many people use their Indy Pass too much, the resorts’ yield drops, and the pass becomes unattractive. Mogensen says a typical Indy customer uses it four days per year. Even then, it’s a relative bargain: $279 per pass (the renewal price) works out to seventy bucks a day for four days of skiing. For comparison’s sake, a single-day ticket at Powder Mountain will cost about $200 this winter.

Indy Pass also limits its sales to avoid inundating smaller resorts. Last spring, Indy sold just shy of 100,000 passes in just a few days. More passes went on sale in October, as the company added 50 additional resorts to its roster. After that, potential buyers had to go on a waiting list.

To put things in perspective: Vail Resorts sold more than two million Epic Passes in 2022. The numbers tell you that Indy Pass isn’t going to upend the economics of the ski business. But it’s changing the world of small ski areas, and ruffling a few feathers in the process.

Last spring, Indy provoked a showdown with a small Colorado ski area called Ski Cooper, which had been offering one of the best deals in skiing. Buying a $379 season pass from Cooper let you ski three additional days at each of 74 partner resorts around the country. But when Ski Cooper pass holders went to, say, Blue Knob, Pennsylvania, Blue Knob didn’t see a cent for the lift ticket.

These reciprocal deals are a long-standing tradition in the ski business, but Mogensen delivered an ultimatum to the 14 Indy re-sorts on Cooper’s roster: either drop Cooper or leave Indy. Eleven of the 14 stayed with Indy, which provides resorts with revenue for each skier visit. “I’d rather sell a lift ticket than a burger,” says John D. DeVivo, the general manager at Antelope Butte.

That isn’t the only battle Indy has waged. Mogensen has directly involved himself in the workings of the ski areas on Indy’s roster, starting with Antelope Butte. Founded in the 1960s, Antelope Butte struggled through a series of owners before it closed in 2004. Far from any major city, it sat empty for a decade and was about to be dismantled when a group of locals raised some money to try and save it. Eventually, they formed a nonprofit to take over the lease and start up the lifts again. The new base lodge was a yurt.

The locals raised more money and built a simple but functional lodge, but the operation struggled, losing six figures every year. As I learned during my ski trip there, the views from the top can’t be beat, and the skiing is fun. A big weekend day at Antelope Butte means 400 skiers. Locals bought me $3 beers on the sundeck after my afternoon on the slopes.

Mogensen got himself onto the board of the foundation that runs Antelope Butte. When we spoke, he was planning some big changes—starting with downsizing the board from thirteen to five members—which caused some tension in the community.

But now there’s at least hope for the mountain. Mark Weitz, who helped organize the fundraising (which included actual bake sales) that brought Antelope Butte back to life, compares the shifting appetite of skiers to the explosion in craft-beer sales a decade ago. “It’s the same thing in skiing—all the big places got crowded and overpriced,” he said. “Now small is the new big.”

Last fall, Mogensen stepped in to rescue another struggling ski area, Black Mountain in Jackson, New Hampshire, which had been slated to close after 88 years in operation. He’s working on an interim operating plan while helping the Fichera family, its owners since 1995, find a buyer.

The stakes are high. Mogensen is on a mission to prove that small ski areas can be both affordable and sustainable, and the Indy Pass is a key part of that plan. Will it save small ski areas? Will it make skiing great again? Or at least cheap and fun? Or will it turn into another Epic Pass—sucking out what’s left of skiing’s soul?

One sign of hope: While in the long term skiing has been in decline in the U.S., with the number of ski areas down 15 percent from 1992, last year saw its biggest numbers ever, with a total of 64.7 million skier days. All those people have to go somewhere, and thanks to the Indy Pass, some of them will find their way to off-the-radar places like Antelope Butte and Black Mountain.

There’s plenty of room, and the beer is cheap.

From January/February 2024

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Lead Photo: Shane Wilder

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Can the Indy Pass Save Skiing from the Ikon and Epic Pass Hordes?

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