The $1 Billion Resort With Ten Apartments For The People Who Run It

Private capital is pouring hundreds of millions into ski country real estate. Workforce housing is still an afterthought, and Breckenridge is the exception that proves it.

Snow in August: Inside the All-Weather Snowmaking Boom Reshaping New England Skiing

Last week, a Connecticut ski area made snow to Dolly Parton. That sentence alone tells you something has changed. View this reel on Instagram Mount Southington announced it has acquired a new TechnoAlpin SnowFactory, a machine that manufactures snow regardless of what the thermometer says outside, and marked the occasion

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

Comeback Country: The Case for Buying a Dead Ski Hill

I read a piece this week on Snowbrains about the four states that used to have ski resorts and don’t anymore. Kansas lost Mt. Bleu in 1983. Nebraska lost Devil’s Nest in 1974. Kentucky lost both Lakewood Village and Ski Butler by the mid 1980s. Georgia lost its

Vail Just Admitted the Epic Pass Growth Story Is Over

For most of the past twenty years, Vail’s playbook was simple. Buy resorts, put them on the Epic Pass, and use the pass’s ever increasing value to get skiers to commit their money before the snow even falls. It worked. It made Vail the largest ski resort operator

The Dan Report: 2026-27 Ski Season Outlook

The first in a new series, tracking the weather setting up our winter, region by region, all season long. I’ve been skiing for over 45 years, and every one of those seasons started the same way, with me squinting at a NOAA outlook map trying to figure out if

The Seasonal Squeeze: What Vermont’s Housing Data Tells Us About Every Ski Town in America

Vermont Housing Finance Agency just published its 2025 to 2029 Housing Needs Assessment, and if you operate, invest, or lend anywhere near a mountain resort, you need to read the housing stock numbers closely. I’ve spent 25 years building and lending in these markets, and the Vermont data is

You’ve Seen the Hints. Here Comes the Story.

A mountain I could not name, a plan I could not share, and the build that starts this winter. By Daniel Kaufman | Dan Ski & Build If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed the breadcrumbs. Back in May I wrote about a place

The Real Estate Trade Hiding Inside the Indy Pass Story

There’s a profile making the rounds right now on Erik Mogensen — the Entabeni Systems founder who’s become the unofficial face of independent ski areas fighting back against Epic and Ikon. The framing in most of the coverage is cultural: small hills, mom-and-pop charm, “skiing shouldn’t

They Had the Mountain. They Had the Plans. They Never Built a Single Lift.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the ones that didn't get built. Not just ski areas — all of it. The subdivisions that stalled in permitting. The resorts that broke ground and ran out of money. The mixed-use developments where the vision was right and the

The Mountain That Got Away — And Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About It

Posted to DanSkiAndBuild.com | June 2026 There’s a particular kind of real estate that makes my brain light up: distressed assets with a story, underutilized land with bones, and places where someone else’s abandoned ambition becomes someone else’s opportunity. Last week, I came across a listing that

They’re Still Listening: Why Independent Ownership Is Skiing’s Best Hope

By Daniel Kaufman My dad called today and asked why I hadn’t posted in a while. It was a fair question, and one that deserved an honest answer. Life has been full lately. Changes personally, changes professionally, a season of figuring things out. But here’s what I told

The Mountain Doesn’t Make the Community. The People Do.

By Daniel Kaufman | Dan Ski & Build I can’t tell you where I was. Not yet, anyway. More on that in a future post — and trust me, it’ll be worth the wait. What I can tell you is this: I recently visited a place that called itself a

What If We Disrupted Ski Real Estate?

DANSKIANDBUILD.COM · SKI REAL ESTATE · MAY 2026 One conversation with an independent ski area operator changed how I see the mountain. The slope is about to get steeper for developers willing to build where the big resorts won’t. I had a conversation today that I can’t stop thinking

US Ski Visits Plunge by 9 Million: What Went Wrong in the West?

The numbers are in, and they’re ugly — at least if you ski west of the Rockies. The National Ski Areas Association just dropped preliminary data for the 2025-26 season: 52.6 million skier visits nationally. That’s down roughly 9 million from last year, a 9.1% drop

Big Corporate Ski Is Dead Wrong About Spring Demand

While Boyne and Vail were pulling the plug in March, a small resort in the Pennsylvania Poconos was skiing into May — and drawing guests from Cleveland, Chicago, and Nashville to prove it. By Daniel Kaufman · @DanSkiAndBuild On May 5th, 2026, there was exactly one ski resort open on the entire

The Mountain Is Tilting: Why Right Now Is the Moment to Rebuild American Skiing

There's a strange thing happening in skiing right now. On paper, the sport has never been bigger — record pass sales, billion-dollar valuations, glossy base villages stretching across the West. And yet anyone who's actually clicked into a binding this season can feel it: something is

Record Visits, Broken Business Models: Why the Ski Industry Needs to Remember What it’s Selling

The numbers seem impossible to square. U.S. ski resorts logged 61.5 million visits in 2024-25, the second-highest season on record. Globally, we hit 399 million skier visits. Demand has never been higher. And yet, Vail Resorts—the behemoth that supposedly owns the industry—reported skier visits

Brodie Mountain: $200M Dream or Another False Start?

Dan Ski & Build · New Ashford, Massachusetts · April 2026 Brodie Mountain went dark in 2002. Sold again in late 2023. And now, more than two decades after its last run, a $200 million plan wants to bring it roaring back — not just as a ski area, but as a full-

MT. BOHEMIA: AMERICA’S LAST HONEST MOUNTAIN

History, Present, Future, and a Trip Report By Daniel Kaufman | Dan Ski & Build | Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan There are places that demand you earn them. Mt. Bohemia is one of them. No snowmaking. No grooming. No beginners. Just 273 inches of Lake Superior powder, 900 vertical feet of uncut terrain,

What Black Mountain, NH Gets Right (That the Big Resorts Have Forgotten)

Spring skiing, live saxophone, Veuve Clicquot, and a lesson the corporate ski industry refuses to learn. There’s a wall at Black Mountain in New Hampshire covered in signed Veuve Clicquot bottles. Not as decoration. As a record. Every bottle represents someone who came back. Someone who showed up, year

An Open Letter from a Pass Holder: Sunday River, It’s Time to Listen

On Boyne’s drift, Killington’s reawakening, and the little mountain in New Hampshire that quietly showed everyone how it’s done. By Daniel Kaufman | April 2026 I’m a Sunday River pass holder. I own property there. I love that mountain — the eight interconnected peaks, the snowmaking that won’

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