We won’t know exactly how many Ikon passes the privately held Alterra will sell until the company goes public - who knows when? - and starts releasing its financials. Vail Resorts sells about 750,000 Epic Passes of various configurations every season. Epic, Ikon or neither? A quick guide to the Pass Wars His remains the last holdout of truly independent ski areas in the West. Pitcher, whose dad, the legendary resort pioneer Kingsbury Pitcher, rescued a struggling Wolf Creek in the mid 1980s, always declines the partnership offers. It’s not for lack of trying by the resorts that Wolf Creek has stayed out of the game. “We fit into a funny little spot and we think that if we do any kind of exchange … say we have an agreement with Taos or other ski areas, we would start to lose some of our revenue.” “We’ve found that people who buy those passes, they begin thinking that they have disposable income and they say, ‘Well I’m saving enough on the pass so I can splurge on a day ticket to Wolf Creek,” he says, his radio crackling with calls from workers spread across his hill. “In many ways, those passes are a lodging play.”Īnd with his lift tickets costing about $70 at the peak of the season, he’s seeing plenty of passholders visiting Wolf Creek to plunder powder. “Regardless of how much they’d like to travel the country, they know that financially there are a lot of hidden costs to those passes,” he says. They ski with an eye on daily lift ticket prices, which will top $200 a day at the larger resorts as patrons are guided toward passes. They are going to the hills six, maybe 10 days. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)įew skiers would not love to travel the world - or even their own state - and ski a variety of resorts every season. Wolf Creek ski area owner Davey Pitcher on the site of a new chairlift under construction at the southwest Colorado resort on July 2, 2018. But it’s not for us,” Pitcher says, climbing into a decades-old Chevy as he inspects the construction of a new chairlift that will expand beginner terrain and expedite expert access to his steeper stuff. “It’s definitely a great thing for a lot of skiers, and I think it’s a welcome change for the industry. His 1,600-acre snow magnet is the largest ski area in the West that hasn’t signed a pass deal with any partner ski areas, a tactic that resorts large and small are adopting - sometimes reluctantly - as the two resort Goliaths grapple. The resolute owner of Wolf Creek ski area isn’t playing the pass game. Colorado ski passes: Which one to buy? CloseĪnd then there’s Davey Pitcher.
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