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 after year, because this mountain earned it. Names scratched in gold wax, stacked floor to ceiling — a physical ledger of loyalty that no Epic Pass algorithm could ever manufacture.
I was there this weekend. It was bluebird. The snow was still there. The champagne was cold. And a saxophonist was absolutely shredding on the deck while people sat in Adirondack chairs under string lights, squinting into the sun with the particular satisfaction of people who know they found the right place.
This is spring skiing in New England the way it’s supposed to be.
Let me be direct about something: the big corporate resorts were already done. Lifts stopped. Lodges locked. The operators had already moved on to calculating Epic Pass attachment rates and prepping their summer programming decks.
Black Mountain was still pouring.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a philosophy.
When Vail or Alterra makes a decision to close, it runs through a spreadsheet. When Black Mountain makes that decision, it runs through a conversation — probably a short one — between people who actually know their skiers by name.
There is no focus-grouped “guest experience strategy” operating at Black Mountain. There is no corporate playbook being followed. There’s just a mountain that has paid close enough attention to its community that it knows, intuitively, that its people want to be there on a warm April weekend with cold bubbles and live music. So it shows up for them.
That’s the whole retention playbook, by the way. You want to know why skiers are loyal to a mountain? It’s not the vert. It’s not the grooming reports. It’s moments like this one — where you feel genuinely seen by the place you’re spending your money and your weekends.
The ski industry is obsessed with acquisition. New pass products, new partnerships, new markets. There’s a whole machinery built around getting the next person through the gate.
Black Mountain is playing a different game. It’s built around keeping the people who already love it — deepening that relationship season by season until it’s expressed not just in return visits but in signed bottles on a shelf that say: I was here. I’m coming back.
I’ve written before about what community-first resort management looks like in theory. This weekend I got to watch it in practice, from an Adirondack chair, with a glass of champagne, listening to a saxophone.
Hard to argue with the results.
🎷⛷️🍾
— Daniel
Daniel Kaufman is a real estate developer, investor, and ski obsessive who documents the intersection of mountain culture, resort economics, and the built environment. With 25+ years developing multifamily, mixed-use, and hospitality projects across the country, Dan brings an operator’s eye to everything — including how ski resorts are run, owned, and why most of them are doing it wrong.
Dan Ski & Build is where the ski hills meet the job site. It’s about the mountains worth defending, the resorts worth studying, and the communities worth building — on snow and off it.
Follow along on Instagram at @DanSkiAndBuild for on-mountain dispatches, resort takes, and the occasional hard hat appearance.
