A little Black magic helped Jackson, N.H. ski area recover from turmoil

Black owner John Fichera and Indy Pass CEO Erik Mogensen appeared on FOX's "Fox and Friends" on opening day. (Indy Pass)

Erik Mogensen was at Magic Mountain when the rains came in December. The founder and owner of Entabeni Systems, a ski-focused business that provides technology solutions for dozens of independent ski resorts across North America, and a company that also acquired Indy Pass last year, was at the Londonderry, Vt., ski area doing a software install. He saw first-hand the sort of impact the pre-Christmas storm delivered across New England with damaging winds and localized flooding putting an abbreviated halt to the ski season.

Magic, one of the dozens of partners on the popular multi-mountain pass, had lost much of its snowpack from the driving rain, and it quickly became clear that, with snowmaking temperatures turning unkind, recovery wasn’t going to be swift (at press time, Magic was aiming to reopen on Jan. 6 with the return of the Green Lift).

Over in New Hampshire, Black Mountain, another ski area on the Indy Pass, which provides two lift tickets to nearly 200 ski areas around the world, didn’t have that unwanted luxury. Fox’s “Fox and Friends” morning show had scheduled an opening day live shot from the ski area that Mogensen and the Indy Pass helped bring back from the dead last fall, when owner John Fichera announced that it would not open. One week later, Entabeni Systems announced that it had reached an agreement with Black to remain open for the 2023-24 season.

So a live shot — which wound up being himself and Fichera — on a national morning show to prove the resiliency of a tiny, independent ski area in the wake of disastrous wind and rain would go a long way. Black had to open.

It “was pretty important to get that national coverage and to help tell this story,” Mogensen said. So, despite initial talk of Black also postponing its scheduled opening day of Dec. 23, Mogensen and the team at Black went to work.

“We blew a pipe and had some other challenges,” Mogensen said, “but eventually we made just enough snow to figure it out. Then, of course, you’ve got to push the snow out. So we had a couple (snow)cat problems. We were pushing all night — pretty much until like 8 a.m. — to essentially get open that Saturday.

“It feels good. It’s good to get it open.”

On that Saturday morning, Mogensen posted a video to Black Mountain social media that showed him driving one of the snowcats, encouraging people to seek him out in the lodge later that day. Mogensen said that Black had taken advantage of cold temperatures in December to make snow and that the ski area was about “75 percent of the way there” until warmer temperatures and the rain event came through to nullify that progress. Still, the Indy Pass holders and other guests he met at Black on opening weekend showed an appreciation for resurrecting one of the gems of the Mount Washington Valley.

“Because of the video that was posted the afternoon before that we were going to open, the one of me and the groomer, I think it definitely influenced a lot of people to come over and say hi,” Mogensen said.

As part of the agreement, Indy Pass will provide resources for Black Mountain to operate this season, as well as assistance to find a new buyer. “We all have a role to play in keeping skiing independent, and it is time to step up,” Mogensen said at the time of the October announcement. “We are not interested in owning ski resorts, but are firmly committed to supporting independent operators like Black Mountain. The struggles that John and his family overcame for decades are the same struggles many ski areas across the country are facing every day.”

Black doesn’t employ the same point-of-sale system that other mountains on the Indy Pass do, Mogensen said, “so we didn’t have the granular data that we might have otherwise. But we had really good data from them being on the Indy Pass and we were able to see what the redemptions were doing. We were able to see the comments, the popularity around Black.”

Black really makes sense as a business, Mogensen said, particularly nestled in the quintessential village of Jackson, located in the ski-hungry Mount Washington Valley. Indy Pass and Unofficial Networks also came to an agreement with Hickory Ski Center in Warrensburg, N.Y., last month to help it open for the season. That deal “makes a little bit less sense, to be honest,” Mogensen said, “but that was a much smaller amount of money and there are places that need a change in structure to operate. Black really isn’t one of them. Black is prime for a private owner, or a good group, to come in and run that place well.”

Mogensen stressed that the Fichera family still owned Black. “I’m there helping and advising and supporting,” he said. “We found (general manager) Gareth Slattery, who came over from Cannon originally, to help John get through this season. But we’re pretty actively hanging on, making sure we can blow as much snow as possible, stay consistently open five days a week, and get to a new ownership, ideally, before we put season passes on sale (in the spring).”

As the general rule goes, the ski industry does one-third of its annual business over Christmas break, one-third over MLK weekend and February breaks, and the rest over the course of the remainder of the season. On that note, Mogensen called this most recent holiday period possibly the worst in a decade or more.

“I think the general public doesn’t understand how fragile these areas are,” Mogensen said. “When you have such a late start to the season, or blow a ton of snow and then you lose it, I had a lot of ski resorts that had to basically start over — certainly from natural snow and a lot from manmade snow. It’s important that the public becomes a little bit more educated about how fragile they are.

“We all want these places to be around; like we’re all super-traumatized when Black Mountain announces it’s going to close, but then we go out and buy an Epic Pass. So, we have to kind of vote with our wallets a little bit and I think that does start with people understanding that these small places are behind the 8-ball when it comes to infrastructure and capital. A lot of their assets are heavily depreciated.”

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