SAM Magazine— Jackson, N.H., Nov. 15, 2023—Amidst a variety of news coming out of the ski area recently, ski industry veteran Gareth Slattery has been named general manager of Black Mountain, N.H. Slattery worked for 17 years at Cannon Mountain, where he climbed the ranks in positions that included patrol director and risk manager. He most recently worked for four years in the patrol department at Montana’s Yellowstone Club.Gareth Slattery

The news comes about a month after the Fichera family, which has owned the 140-acre Black Mountain since 1995, announced the resort would not open for the 2023-24 season, an announcement that was reversed after Indy Pass and Entabeni Systems owner Erik Mogensen stepped in to offer financial support and help find a new owner. 

In this transition year, Slattery said the ski area will operate five days a week from Wednesday thru Sunday. 

To catch up on the situation with the venerable ski area, founded in 1935, SAM publisher Olivia Rowan sat down with Slattery, current owner John Fichera, Mogensen, and Andy Shepard, another New England ski industry vet, who Mogensen hired to help with the resort’s ownership transition, to learn about their new partnership and plans for the future. 

SAM: Gareth, tell us about your ski background.

SLATTERY: I’ve been skiing since I was four years old, it’s been my life and it's my kids' life. My mother got us all to the slopes at Hidden Valley in Pennsylvania, us five kids and my father who did not know how to ski. And then we moved back East, and here was Mad River Glen. These are the types of places we look for. We weren’t there for a high speed detachable, we were there for the old lodge, the greasy burger, the sense of community. 

I think the Goliaths are really giving us a lot of fodder with those long lift lines. There is a lot of evidence, and a lot to work with, in families coming back to these mom-and-pop ski areas to really enjoy the true essence of skiing and uncrowded slopes.  

At Black, I have to figure out what those ingredients are and put it into the product—a clean, safe place you can line up your five kids and your husband and get them off to lessons so the mother can go skiing. That’s why I am part of this mission, that’s where I came from, that’s where I’ve always been, and what I’ve been attracted to.

SAM:  Erik, what is your role and goal in this?  

MOGENSEN: This is about finding a new custodian for Black Mountain. We had the Indy Pass data, and we saw visits increase, and we saw the feedback from guests. Black Mountain is absolutely on the right trajectory. There is a place for Black Mountain, but John [Fichera] can’t run it forever. That’s really what it all came down to.

SAM: John, coming from a family business, I’m curious if your kids were in the business and if there was any chance of succession to the next generation?

FICHERA: No, my oldest son works in marketing for a corporation, and my son Douglas has his own snowmaking installation company. He’s worked at many of the big ski areas, he was featured as one of SAM’s "10 Under 30," and he’s a good contractor. He’ll be here during his off season helping out, but needs to keep on doing what he’s doing, running his business. 

SHEPARD: There’s another point to be made about the mountain. It hasn’t failed financially, it's still a viable business. John’s been doing this for 28 years and he’s just run out of steam. He’s just looking for someone else to pick the ball up that he’s run with for 28 years and handing it off is now the challenge.

SAM: Would you say one of your challenges was access to capital and maintaining capital upgrades at Black Mountain compared to what was happening at the other the ski areas around you?

FICHERA: The biggest challenge is that the business models have changed. Nobody reduces debt, they just keep borrowing and borrowing and borrowing. Then they sell to the next guy and they kick that can to the next owner. Small places have to be able to make the payment. Constant upgrades and overcrowding don’t make for a better experience.

SHEPARD: The fact that lifts may be old doesn’t mean that people don’t want to ride them. They just want to know that they’re safe. And you know, what we can guarantee is that after Gareth gets a chance to dive in and do all the work that he’s doing now, that mountain will open safely—as it has in the past. And that’ll be a commitment to all of our skiers.

SAM: Have your visits held steady? Or were you losing market share to the other areas nearby?

FICHERA: Our visits have been about the same, but with the advent of the Indy Pass, we’ve seen a skyrocket in that portion of the business, and that’s turned on a whole different set of new customers.

We just saw a decline in staffing. With two Vail resorts within eight miles, it’s a different animal. We’ve never seen this in this area of New Hampshire.

SAM: What are you most proud of at Black?

FICHERA: Sustaining it for 28 years in the Valley of the Giants. We live within 60 minutes of eight other ski areas, and seven of them are owned by ski corporations. We are true dinosaurs.

When we purchased it, the place had just gone through a bankruptcy. It had never closed, but the previous owners were trying to play fast and furious with their debt structure and that didn’t work out. So, what I’m most proud of is I was able to obtain this place, run it, and keep it alive, and we’ve done very well.

SAM: What would be your goal with the sale? Is it to sell it to a group or an individual?

FICHERA: I’m not interested in what their group structure is. If they’re willing to make a commitment and a pledge to keep it going and keep it running, that’s the best scenario for us.  

SAM: Andy, you have worked with other ski areas in this capacity. What are your thoughts on making this work?

SHEPARD: I try to find people within the community that share the same values that I do about the ski area and its importance to the community. I’m kind of just a facilitator in that process. Each of these community ski areas represents more than a ski area. These are essentially families that come together each winter to recommit to each other, to have fun with each other, to get to know each other and share life memories.

I love Erik’s vision that the Indy Pass can be more than just an opportunity to create skiing experiences for people. This is also an opportunity to invest in the sustainability of independent ski areas because of what they represent to communities. My job here is to find a buyer and work with Gareth and John and that new buyer to come up with a sustainable model. 

SAM: You had a community meeting last week, what’s the response from the community?

SHEPARD: First, I like having these meetings with the community, so people have an understanding of what’s happening. If you don’t fill in that white space with actual information, people tend to create their own information, and that can be counterproductive. 

There are a whole bunch of people that really care deeply about Black Mountain, about Jackson, and about the role that Black Mountain plays in the community. They want to see this work. 

I pledged to them that we’d be getting together on a regular basis. Maybe the next time we get together, Gareth will be there to answer some questions about what operations are going to look like this year. But this is also an opportunity for me to help identify through the community some people that could be working up at the mountain this year.

I’ll go through the same exercise with John and Gareth and staff, and identify the value proposition for Black Mountain. Why would someone ski at Black instead of Cannon or some of these other places? I have a good feeling about what that is, but I really want that to be community driven. The sooner we can start to communicate that to people as I start to look for buyers for whom that value proposition resonates, the more broadly we can get that message out into the marketplace.

SAM: What’s the biggest challenge in your sale, and the best selling point?

SHEPARD: I haven’t really been able to engage the buyers yet because we have to go through some basic financial equations first. John and I are going to put a package together that I can put in front of prospective buyers so they understand what the financials look like, what the opportunity looks like, and how they build a business model around that to support whatever decision they may make to buy it. 

There are a bunch of different models we’re looking at. One is a 501c3 option. There are a number of areas that have turned into 501c3s, and they continue to thrive 20 years later. 

There’s also the municipally owned option, though I don’t have a sense yet whether that’s a viable option. Then you’ve got the Mad River Glen co-op model, or the Yellowstone Club membership model. You have a family or individual buyer, or you have a corporate buyer. 

I think at this point it seems that all five of those are still on the table. What I want is for John to have some options, two or three bids, so he can make the best and most informed decision.

SAM: Erik, you have said that the nonprofit model is one you think would work for some small ski areas. Can you explain why?

MOGENSEN: I think about 25 percent of the non-corporate ski areas in North America need another ownership solution. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be nonprofit. There are a lot of liabilities in having a group of volunteers or board of directors try to run a ski area from a nonprofit status. I’m definitely a capitalist, and there can be issues with nonprofits that I don’t think we’ve solved yet in skiing.

If we look at the nonprofits that have run very well, Bridger Bowl and Bogus Basin particularly, they focused around running the ski area as a for-profit business with a nonprofit backend, if you will. 

I’ve also seen a lot of ski areas struggle with trying to run the nonprofit model. So I don’t necessarily believe that a nonprofit model is something that we should copy and paste. But I do believe it’s a front runner that needs to be adjusted and adopted. And we do need a solution for the 25 percent. It’s very hard to make some of areas commercially viable on their own. 

If you look at places like Beaver Mountain (Utah), they opened in 1938 and they’ve kept it affordable, and they’ve kept it in the same family. Multi-generational responsible operators are fantastic. 

SAM: What is Entabeni and Indy Pass’s business case for getting involved here? You’re fronting some money to make sure this is successful, so how does this make sense from a business perspective? 

MOGENSEN: Access to outdoor recreation is extremely important. As an industry, we’re making skiing more expensive and more exclusive. With Entabeni and Indy, we're trying to keep skiing from becoming an exclusive 1-percenter sport. Entabeni provides technology tools and data to keep that from happening. Indy Pass provides marketing, data analytics, and group buying power. We’ve built a team of people and processes and ways of thinking, and we’re continuing to build a team with people like Gareth, John, and Andy involved. 

So it’s just an expansion on what we’ve already been doing. If John didn’t open this year, either that ski area would not exist or potentially be bought by one of the mega buyers, and the results are the same: access is limited in a lot of ways. We're trying to keep people from limiting access to skiing and outdoor recreation.

SAM: The latest Kottke Report shows the large and extra-large ski areas had dramatic increases in visits last year while small ski areas saw a slight decrease and youth participation is off. What are the biggest challenges for areas like Black Mountain?  

MOGENSEN: The number-one way for these ski areas and operators to be sustainable is to highlight and play to their biggest asset. Which is a different experience. The mega operators, they’re constantly touting more terrain or adding lift capacity. They talk about big vertical, luxury lodging, how fast your lift is, how many new snow guns, all those types of things.

The small places need to talk about what they’re really good at. Black Mountain is a really good place to learn to ski. The parking is a lot cheaper. You want to share the ways that the experience at Black Mountain is going to be a lot better than driving all the way to a destination mega resort. Those are the things that we need to talk about.

SHEPARD: Erik's thinking is exactly aligned with mine. These small community ski areas all have a great message, but they typically don’t have either the experience or the bandwidth to cultivate relationships with the media and get those messages out effectively. And so those points get lost. In the industry we talk a lot about fancy lifts and more uphill capacity without talking about accessibility, without talking about the quality of the skiing experience.

One piece of the value proposition at Black Mountain is that you're in Jackson, one of the most iconic New England ski villages. Currier and Ives had Jackson in mind when they started doing all their paintings in the 1800s. It’s the quintessential experience, from the dining to the inns, the cross-country skiing, and all the things you could do in the valley. There’s an awful lot to be excited about.

Erik and I are going to help Gareth and John tell that message in a way that I hope will inspire whoever wants to buy this place to see what it is they’re buying, be inspired by that, and want to be a part of that. We need people who understand what this experience could be, and needs to be, and are committed to maintaining that.