Can Tech Save Small Ski Resorts From Extinction?
The top floor of the lodge at the Black Mountain ski resort in Jackson, New Hampshire, isn’t filled with red-cheeked skiers having lodge lunch, warming their boots by the fire, or taking a break from a day on the hill. The team makes up a living laboratory for a small tech consultancy called Entabeni Systems that, in the last few years, has quite nimbly carved out an entrepreneurial niche in the US ski industry. Company founder Erik Mogensen is an engineer ski bum who told me he “grew up in a blue-collar family that spent all of its disposable income on skiing.” In fact, when Mogensen was 16 and the local hill in his upstate New York town shut down, he spent the better part of a season building his own ski run in his parents’ backyard. These companies own snow sports’ biggest multi-resort season passes—Epic and Ikon, respectively—and have bought up many once-independently-owned ski resorts across the country. Entabeni, on the other hand, has quietly become the on-call expert shop for mom-and-pop US ski resorts that are still standing and working hard to uphold a relationship with their communities.
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