Should You Buy a Pass This Year?

Rejoice! For summer’s tyrannic reign is over.

The larch are popping, rains have arrived, and it’s finally cool enough to think straight. In a few days, the woods will alight with the echoing booms of the autumn harvest, and the white horizon will creep a bit lower. Woodsmoke will hover in the air, soups will steam gently on the range, and we’ll tighten our coats around our necks and brace for the most wonderful time of year.

But in the meantime, there’s business to attend to. Primarily: should you buy a season pass this year? A pass is no small investment; in some places it’s pushing $2k for the privilege of taking a ride to the top of the mountain. It would be foolhardy to plow blindly forward, and there are a number of considerations at play.

Here are a few study questions to help you with the hardest decision of the fall.

Do you like Skiing? This one seems elementary, but it’s worth thinking long and hard about. Sure, all your friends like to ski, but do you usually just take one token run then head to the lodge for alpines and cheese fries? Remember that skiing is difficult, dangerous and cold. Also, ski hills aren’t country clubs. Lodge privileges are open to the public! If you don’t actually like to ski, maybe save a few bucks and spring for a nice jacket so that you look the part curled up with a book next to the lodge fire.

What’s the long range forecast? Are we looking at a dismal forecast like the terrible drought of aught-8? Or on the cusp of another glorious powmageddon like ’11 (or dare we dream of ’96!)? predicting the weather five months out is a notoriously tricky job, but there’s no reason not to try. I wonder what The Blob is up to? Or equatorial sea surface temperatures in the Pacific? Best to bone up on your climate science before pulling trig on a pass!

BitterrootPowFest (2 of 11) — Should you buy a pass this year?

Is there a boycott you need to know about? The relationship between ski hill operators and passholders is not a traditional business/customer trade off. There’s usually only one or two real options for skiing, and they’re selling a fix to a large number of addicts. It really looks a lot more like drug dealer/junkie relationship, where mutual contempt is on a constant simmer, but everyone knows that at the end of the day people are going to put their principles aside and go skiing. But keep an eye out for a boycott, sometimes the people need to make their voices felt, and you’d hate to be the only scab in the lift line.

Can you get a deal? Do you have a buddy in the ticket office? Does your local hill offer a AAA discount? Is there anyone that you can blackmail or kidnap? If not, then there are other ways to save some coin. Ski bums across the west have made great progress in working off passes by hanging chairs, bootpacking bowls, and other unpleasant and labor intensive tasks. It’s worth seeing if you can work something out!

How about uphill traffic? Does your local hill allow skinning? Experts are torn on what uphill traffic policies do to ticket sales. Some folks are worried that people won’t buy tickets if they can hike, other folks actively boycott ski hills with retrograde skinning policies. Where do you stand?

What about a weekday Pass? If you’re thinking about buying a pass, then you probably live in a little mountain town. And if you live in a little mountain town, then you probably have some kind of weird, probably-at-least-partially-made-up job that trades trivial things like “health insurance” and a “living wage” for a great deal of flexibility. See if your ski hill offers discounted mid-week passes. You don’t want to wait in the Saturday lift lines anyway.

These study questions are intended to help you decide weather to pull the trigger on a pretty significant purchase this winter. Ultimately, the choice is up to you. I hope it helped!