How the nomadic New England skier can save money this season

Where can the nomadic New England skier look for deals? (Keith Pearson/NESJ)

If you have a home mountain, odds are you have a pass that includes that mountain. But what about the person who doesn’t want to ski the same place 10-to-50-plus times a year? Indy Pass has been sold out for months. The Ikon and Epic passes fit the bill for the handful of places on the pass, but also limit where you can go.

What options are there for the New England nomadic skier?

If you want to test your ability to look into the future, you can probably score a pretty good deal on Oct. 12 that March 3 is going to be a good ski day.

Ski areas will offer ticket packs, usually between two and four days, that can be used anytime – though bigger discounts are available if you take the packs with blackout dates or only valid midweek.

The ski associations in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont try to get people to use all the ski resorts in their respective states. They each have their unique way of doing it.

For these, the early bird gets the worm. On Oct. 1, the Ski Vermont 4 Pass goes up for sale.

How popular is it? There’s a waiting room that starts a half hour before it goes on sale at noon.

For $199, the user gets four non-transferable lift tickets – with blackout dates that vary by resort – that must be used at four different ski areas. It is valid at Bolton Valley, Bromley, Burke, Jay Peak, Killington, Mad River Glen, Magic, Middlebury Snow Bowl, Mount Snow, Okemo, Pico, Saskadena Six, Ski Quechee, Smugglers’ Notch, Stowe, Stratton and Sugarbush.

Ski New Hampshire’s version is pretty simple, buying transferable lift tickets without blackout dates. The quantities available vary by resort and each resort has its own price. The more popular places will sell out quickly — “within minutes,” according to Ski New Hampshire’s Kathleen Harrigan, who also noted that there are deep discounts for some of the smaller ski areas.

Tickets are expected to be available in mid-October, and Harrigan recommends people signing up for the Ski New Hampshire e-newsletter, available on their website, to get notifications for when they go on sale.

We told you the early bird gets the worm on these deals. Unfortunately, the worm has already become lunch in Maine, whose special passes sold out quickly this month.

The Ski Maine Mountain Pass offers 28 transferable vouchers with no blackout dates for $619, plus $10 shipping, with a limit of four per order. It comes with two vouchers each for BigRock, Big Moose, Black Mountain of Maine, Camden Snow Bowl, Hermon Mountain, Lost Valley, Mount Abram, Saddleback, Pleasant Mountain, Sugarloaf, Sunday River and Titcomb.

It also has two vouchers that can be split among Baker Mountain, Lonesome Pine Trails or Quoggy Jo, and the final two vouchers can be split between Powderhouse Hill or Spruce Mountain.

If someone uses their two Sunday River vouchers over the course of a weekend, and then their two Sugarloaf vouchers the following weekend, the user is already ahead, and still has 24 days of skiing remaining.

Passes went on sale Sept. 13 and lasted less than a week, so be sure to look for it well in advance next summer.

While there might not be passports, like for fourth and fifth graders, there are still opportunities for adult skiers and riders to get outside and not be tied to a single mountain all winter.

(Keith Pearson is the editor of the New England Ski Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].)