A Note From Rikki Cooper

To the White Pass Family:

I wanted to take a moment, as our winter starts slowing down, to thank each and every customer, employee, and visitor to White Pass for helping meRikki through my first year in the General Manager role. I have been hugged and congratulated, offered advice from many of you in the lift lines (lots of it!), and felt so supported and thankful for this wonderful community. I know this year has had its challenges (Covid, parking, power outages, road closures, etc.) but your smiling faces, despite any hiccups, have made it all worthwhile. I have gone from wandering the base area with a spring in my step, to plodding along rather carefully as I approach my due date with child #3. If I’m a little slower jumping over the rails to assist with the lift line in the next few weeks, please forgive me. Thank you for the warm wishes and congratulations on that front as well. It has been a busy winter and I am looking forward to a busy summer as well!

With an eye on maintaining this ski area as a welcoming place for your family and mine, I wanted to announce our plans for our upcoming season pass sale. White Pass is a home away from home for many of you, and we want to make sure that our core customers can continue to purchase a season pass despite growing interest in visiting our gem of a ski area. I recognize that the increased interest must be balanced so that we do not invite too many people to the party and dilute the quality experience we have come to expect. With these goals in mind, White Pass will be limiting the number of Unlimited Season Passes available. We will not exceed the number of guests we had on the hill during the 2021/22 season. Although the market is ever-changing and we adapt as necessary, we plan to continue our policy of capping day ticket availability in 2022/23. I know we all miss the good old days of deciding to take the family skiing on a whim on Saturday morning, but our growing customer base makes that memory all but impossible to resurrect. Increasing profitability while sacrificing customer experience is simply not in the best interest of our customers or ultimately, of the company. By requiring advanced purchase lift tickets, we do a much better job of managing the hill and we never have to turn away families who drive 3 hours to enjoy a day with us.

We plan to offer Unlimited Season Passes exclusively to our current (and 2020/21) passholders starting March 15th and continuing through March 31st. Beginning April 1st, we will allow all others to purchase until May 31st, or until we have hit our capacity, whichever comes first. We are excited to welcome new people to the White Pass Family, but need to honor our commitment to those who have gotten us here with their support year after year. No passes will be sold over the summer, and we will offer another limited batch of season passes in the Fall. Our Off-Peak Season Pass will also be available for purchase for those of you who are able to sneak away from the home or office on our least crowded days of the year. Those Off-Peak passes will be available to new or renewing customers on April 1st. We have tried to strike a balance in our pricing this year between keeping up with ever increasing costs of fuel, labor, and supplies, while maintaining a price point that we hope your family can afford. It is never our intention to make skiing inaccessible due to price, but we are committed to paying our employees competitive wages, fueling up those snow cats for grooming, and keeping the lifts turning safely. We cannot do any of it without your patronage, and I want to thank you for supporting this locally run ski area now and in the future.

There’s still a lot of skiing and snowboarding to come this season. I’ll be looking for you on the hill!

All the best,
Rikki Cooper

White Pass General Manager