Editor’s note: This is a developing story that will be updated with more information as it’s received.

Arapahoe Basin Ski Area announced that the 2025-26 Ikon Pass will offer unlimited access to its slopes starting this spring.

Anyone who buys next season’s full Ikon Pass when it goes on sale March 13 will gain access to spring skiing at the resort starting March 31. People who have a current 2024-25 Ikon Pass will not gain full access.

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The 2025-26 Ikon Base Pass will remain at five-day access to A-Basin with no blackout dates. Ikon Pass has decided to get rid of its Base Plus Pass offering. The change in access to the ski area comes as A-Basin looks toward its second season under the ownership of Alterra Mountain Co.

“Essentially, for the 25/26 season, Ikon Pass will function as an A-Basin season pass,” A-Basin Chief Operating Officer Alan Henceroth wrote in his blog post announcing the change.

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Taking a break from skiing Thursday, March 6, Henceroth sat down with a Summit Daily News reporter for an interview about the upcoming change to A-Basin access on the Ikon Pass.

“Alterra doesn’t have much of an interest in really changing the way the Basin is,” Henceroth said. “They bought the Basin because they liked it, and it’s a great mountain. It has a great culture. You know, we’ve got a fantastic group of employees that work here. I don’t see that stuff changing.”

During the 2024-25 season, A-Basin’s first season with Alterra, there were no changes to the Ikon Pass, with seven days of access for full passholders and five days for base passholders.

A-Basin’s biggest change during the 2024-25 season was the implementation of a parking reservation system on weekends and holidays through the height of the season, from Dec. 21 to May 4. A general parking reservation cost $20 in all of A-Basin’s main lots during the 2024-25 season, unless a driver carpooled with four or more people in their vehicles, in which case parking was free but still required a reservation.

During the 2025-26 season, the parking reservations will continue to run on weekends and holidays from mid December through early May, with more specifics on parking to be released in coming weeks, according to A-Basin.

“We’re always working to make the place better,” Henceroth said. “Better means we have a lot of different objectives we’re working toward, whether it be providing an incredible experience for our guests — whether it be a solid profitable business. We want to be a community leader.”

The past and future of A-Basin

As a snow squall barraged A-Basin on Thursday, skiers wrapping up their day on the slopes had mixed opinions on upcoming access changes to the Ikon Pass. 

One Fort Collins resident pumped both fists into the air and a grin spread across his face when heard the news that the full Ikon Pass would offer unlimited access to A-Basin — his favorite mountain — for the 2025-26 season. No more saving days for spring.

A Denver couple, both with full Ikon Passes, were more ambivalent, telling Summit Daily that they only ski a handful of days at A-Basin anyways and are unlikely to use more than seven days, since they also ski at other resorts on the pass.

On the other hand, a long-time local, who had an A-Basin season pass for 10 years but bought an Ikon Pass this year after Alterra purchased the mountain, worried that weekdays would become more crowded, impacting the culture at A-Basin.

But Henceroth said that he doesn’t believe the change to unlimited access on the full Ikon Pass will change the culture A-Basin has built for itself — if he did, he said he wouldn’t have gone through with it.

“Every time we’ve done something bold, we’ve taken a lot of criticism for it,” Henceroth said. “When we added snowmaking, people thought it was going to destroy A-Basin. When we added Montezuma Bowl, there were people saying it was going to destroy A-Basin. When we added the Beavers, there were people saying it was going to destroy A-Basin. When we added Black Mountain Lodge, there were people saying it was going to destroy A-Basin. So we don’t like getting that negative feedback, but it’s part of the territory.”

Founded in 1946, Arapahoe Basin Ski Area hosts the longest ski and ride season in Colorado most years, often starting in late October or early November and running through June or even July. It is sometimes referred to as “The Legend” for its steep, off-piste terrain like Pallavicini and hike-to terrain including the East Wall and Steep Gullies, and lift-adjacent parking known as The Beach.

For most of A-Basin’s 78-year history, “the most core business objective was to get more people here,” Henceroth said. “We always had plenty of excess room. We could take more people. Until about 2015 or 2016, it was rarely an issue.”

From 1998 to 2019, A-Basin partnered with the Vail Resorts, offering unlimited access on the multiple iterations of the Epic Pass. But sometime in the mid-2010s, that changed with more and more people showing up at A-Basin, especially on weekends and holidays.

“On one level, the business was rocking, lots of people were here. Business was good,” Henceroth said. “But it was really rough on the guests. It was really rough on the employees because sometimes hundreds, sometimes a thousand, more people showed up than there was room for. That just makes a really bad scene. We knew we had to fix that, and we weren’t able to fix that in that partnership. We decided to leave.”

Parking especially, was a pinch point, Henceroth said. So, A-Basin ended its partnership with Vail Resorts and, starting in the 2019-2020 season, it began teaming up with Aterra to offer limited seven-day access to Ikon passholders and five-day access to Ikon Base passholders.

After its breakup with Vail Resorts, A-Basin focused on reducing skier numbers on its busiest days, an unusual move in the ski industry, in favor of preserving its “culture and vibe.”

That’s also where the parking reservation system came in, Henceroth said. He noted that A-Basin had decided to implement parking reservations before he knew for certain that the sale to Alterra was going to go through.

“It’s working really well,” Henceroth said, noting that so far in the 2024-25 season there have been no days that A-Basin contributed to unsafe conditions on U.S. Highway 6 on Loveland Pass and no days when people had to be turned away due to parking reaching capacity. 

Also, during the 2024-25 season, there has been an average of three riders per vehicle on Saturdays and Sundays, up from 1.8 during the 2022-23 season, and 42% of all skiers and riders have arrived “sustainably” on Saturdays and Sundays via carpool, electric vehicle, the Summit Stage or Snowstang, according to the ski area.

That is in contrast to past years when parking would sometimes reach capacity, resulting in skiers being turned away or illegally parking on Loveland Pass, occasionally resulting in vehicles being towed from the mountain pass.

While those fixes helped solve the A-Basin’s overflow problem, the problem the ski area is now trying to address is that “our soft periods are a little too soft,” Henceroth said.

He’s not talking about the snow — he’s talking about weekdays and the early season when A-Basin can seem a little too sleepy.

“We really are trying to balance business. We really want to continue to stay open in the fall, which has become soft,” Henceroth said. “We’re really excited about this opportunity to un-restrict access on the Ikon Pass. We think that’s really going to help us out to do that.”

Looking to the future, Henceroth said that A-Basin is working on a master development plan to submit to the U.S. Forest Service that would include “a few more parking spots.” At the Summit Chamber’s Ski Area COO Summit for the 2023-24 season, he discussed a master plan that could potentially add up to 350 additional cars, a pedestrian bridge and a gondola connecting the parking lot to the base area.

“We really want to keep the culture and the vibe the way it is,” Henceroth said. “We think these two changes, the Ikon Pass and the parking reservations are the way to do it. It’s going to help our business be consistent, stable and reliable.”

What else does the Ikon Pass offer?

In addition to now offering unlimited access to A-Basin, the Ikon Pass also offers access to over 60 ski areas across the U.S., South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, among other benefits, according to a news release from Alterra.

Henceroth noted that the Ikon Pass offers access to various Colorado mountains as well as “iconic mountains” like Mammoth Mountain, Palisades Tahoe, Aspen-Snowmass, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, Big Sky, Taos and Alta, as well as global names such as Zermatt, Chamonix, Niseko, Valle Nevado and more.

The full Ikon Pass starts at $1,329 while the Ikon Base Pass starts at $909. An A-Basin only season pass with additional benefits will also be available starting at $659, as well as a midweek A-Basin pass starting at $499.

“We know a lot of people are excited. I personally think that the Ikon Pass now with A-Basin unlimited, I think it’s the best pass ever,” Henceroth said. “You can ski A-Basin as much as you want. You can go to all these other fantastic mountains.”