A Day at Black Mountain with Erik Mogensen
My father and I spent the day today with Erik Mogensen, his fiancée, Ashley Cunningham, at Black Mountain in Jackson, New Hampshire. If you follow independent skiing at all, you know the name. Erik is the CEO of Entabeni Systems, the director of Indy Pass, and now the sole owner of Black Mountain itself. Spending a day with him on his own hill was one of those experiences that reshapes how you think about an entire industry, not just one mountain.
The short version of how he got here
Black Mountain almost closed in 2023. The Fichera family, who had run it for roughly 30 years, posted on Facebook that they were essentially picking out coffins for the place. Erik showed up with a proposal, let us run it for a year and we will find you a buyer. Nobody with the means and the will came forward, so in October 2024 he bought it himself through Entabeni and Indy Pass, with a plan to convert it into a Mad River Glen style co-op by the 2025-26 season.
That plan changed. Earlier this year Erik bought out the early shareholders who had put money in under the co-op model and took Black Mountain back to full private ownership. He told the group he had come to a decision he called “a massive direction change,” and part of that decision was moving Entabeni Systems and Indy Pass headquarters entirely out of Colorado and into Jackson. Hearing him walk through that decision in person, standing in the base lodge where he says most of it actually got made, hit differently than reading about it.
What we saw
Erik has turned Black into what he calls an Independent Mountain Laboratory. Walking the mountain with him and his fiancée today, that framing made a lot more sense than it does on paper. This is not a museum piece being preserved out of nostalgia, it is a working test bed. New snowmaking investment, lift work, a hike to terrain pod, lodge renovations, and a rebuilt base lodge that now doubles as Entabeni’s office space. He mentioned the relocation is expected to bring more than 30 jobs in software, hardware, finance, and marketing to the Mount Washington Valley, which is a real number for a town the size of Jackson.
What he talked about
Erik does not talk like someone protecting a brand. He talks like an operator who has been in the trenches of a 91 year old ski area and wants to fix the parts of the industry that are broken. He kept coming back to a phrase, something like spending 90 percent of the time understanding the problem before spending 10 percent solving it. That shows up in how Entabeni builds software and hardware, not for the big corporate mountains, but specifically for the small independents who cannot afford enterprise ticketing and guest management systems built for Vail or Alterra scale.
He was candid about the tension. Skiing is competing against Instagram, travel budgets, team sports, and a handful of mega passes owned by two corporations. Indy Pass exists as the counterweight to that, giving skiers access to independent mountains without pushing them into a single owner’s ecosystem. Twelve of those Indy resorts are right here in New Hampshire, Cannon, Great Glen, Ragged, Tenney among them.
The personal side
What stuck with me most was not the business strategy, it was watching him and his fiancée talk about actually building a life at Black Mountain. He bought a house along the mountain’s Sugarbush trail. He talked about wanting to make Jackson home, in the literal sense, not just headquarters on paper. For an operator who has spent two decades chasing a career in skiing, watching him plant roots on the same hill he is trying to save was a good reminder that the best turnarounds are usually personal before they are strategic.
Why this matters if you build or invest in mountain towns
I think about workforce housing and employer anchored development in resort communities for a living, so a lot of today’s conversation landed close to home. Erik is running the exact experiment I care about most, can a small, independent mountain stay financially viable and community rooted while everything around it consolidates. His answer so far is data, iteration, and a willingness to change course publicly when the original plan is not working. That is a rare thing to see up close, and I am glad my father got to see it with me.
My dad just turned 80 and he still skis. Let that sink in for a second. Getting to spend a day like this with him, on a mountain, talking with someone who is fighting to keep places like Black Mountain alive for the next generation, was not lost on me. There are not many days that mix family, this sport we both love, and a genuinely inspiring business story into one afternoon. This was one of them, and I will remember it for a long time. Thank you to Erik and Ashley, and to everyone at Black Mountain, for the incredible hospitality today. You made two guys from out of town feel like part of the community for a day, and that generosity is exactly the spirit this post is about.
More on Black Mountain, Indy Pass, and what an Independent Mountain Laboratory actually builds next, coming soon.
