This Vermont Family Resort Just Joined Indy With Mandatory Reservations
Smugglers' Notch joins the Indy Pass for 2026-27 with advance reservations required, while Bear Den installs 100 new snow guns across three faces.
Smugglers' Notch is joining the Indy Pass for 2026-27, and the fine print is the story. Bear Den Partners CEO Jon Schaefer confirmed the Vermont family resort will accept Indy, with advance reservations mandatory so Indy volume fills empty midweek chairs and beds instead of stacking already-busy weekends. Core Smuggs season passholders stay guaranteed access. That capacity-first rule is the detail Indy shoppers need before treating Smuggs like an open walk-up day.
Schaefer's September 8 letter leans hard on keeping Smuggs recognizably Smuggs while funding the work the mountain needs. Bear Den also owns Burke, Berkshire East, and Catamount. Only Smugglers' Notch joins Indy from that group this year. Staff get a $25 Indy employee add-on, which Schaefer frames as a recruiting tool as much as a perk. For Indy holders inside a two-hour radius of more than a dozen other Indy alpine and Nordic partners, Smuggs becomes the big Vermont family-village stop that used to sit outside the network. There are no Indy blackout dates on the published partnership, but the reservation gate is the real throttle.
100 snow guns before the lift list
Snowmaking is the first major capital wave guests will feel. Bear Den's August package adds 100 new guns (80 energy-efficient towers and 20 lower-air-demand mobiles), about 1,100 feet of pipe replacement, pump and valve upgrades, a Black Snake-to-Upper Rum Runner water connection so both trails can be made at once, and more snowmobiles for crews. Mountain ops VP Mike McAdoo said the point is to run more equipment in short Vermont cold windows and build a durable early base without burning the team. Lift replacements are acknowledged as future work, not this winter's centerpiece. That order of operations matches Schaefer's capacity math: make snow and manage arrivals before chasing raw uphill volume.
Indy Pass Base and Indy+ shoppers should treat Smuggs as a reservation mountain from day one, then watch early-season coverage on Sterling and the village faces as the new guns come online. Soft close: start with the Smugglers' Notch encyclopedia page for terrain and family lodging notes, then cross-check Indy Pass access rules before you lock a Jeffersonville weekend.