I was looking at Winter Park’s social feed a couple weeks ago and saw the announcement: skiing closed April 19, Trestle Bike Park opens May 23. Same mountain, different rubber on the tires, five weeks of gap in between.
And every spring I keep landing on the same uncomfortable question: most ski resorts treat their bike park like a sidebar. A footnote after the snow report. But the stoke among mountain bikers is real — and the marketing dollars allocated to capture it rarely match that energy.
The Loam Pass Is Expanding. The Ski Industry Should Pay Attention.
Last week, Loam Pass — the mountain biking equivalent of Indy Pass — announced it’s expanding to 15 new destinations. That’s a pass ecosystem growing fast, with a dedicated audience that has disposable income and a content creator culture driving word-of-mouth without a big marketing budget.
Sound familiar? That’s exactly how Indy Pass grew. Passionate riders, shareable experiences, social content that did the marketing work for free. The ski industry wrote this playbook. Bike parks are running it back — and doing it dialed.
Resorts with serious bike parks — like Winter Park, which operates Trestle as a full seven-day-a-week summer program with gondola rides, alpine slide, and extended evening hours through Labor Day — are well-positioned. But positioning only matters if you’re actively marketing it.
Treating It Like an Afterthought Is a Business Risk
I covered this when a Colorado mountain operation had to cancel its summer season entirely — the result of years of underinvestment that left no operational margin when conditions got tough. That’s the ceiling of a half-committed strategy. The full story is in my earlier post on the year-round revenue warning every resort needs to hear.
The bike park audience is not your ski guest. Different crowd, different media habits, different influencers, and a content culture that honestly outperforms ski resort Instagram on engagement. Marketing to them the same way is a mismatch from day one.
Here’s what actually moves the needle for bike park marketing:
- Trail condition updates — riders check these obsessively, just like skiers hit the snow report. Give them a twice-weekly reason to visit your feed.
- Creator seeding at opening weekend — invite 8 to 10 local MTB creators to day one. The content they produce is worth more than any paid ad spend.
- Pass product clarity — if you’re on Loam Pass, say so louder than you think you need to. Pass riders plan ahead.
- Summer content series — not just reposts from the bike park account, an actual resort-POV content calendar with your team’s voice in it.
The gnarly truth: a 90-day bike park season has less margin for error than a ski season. Every post, every creator relationship, every email counts twice as much when the window is that short.
The resorts treating their bike parks like a real product — with a dedicated pre-season campaign, creator seeding, and pass clarity — are building year-round revenue that protects them from bad snow years. That’s not a future strategy. That’s what the smart ones are doing right now. What does your resort’s summer marketing look like — and are you treating the bike park like a ski resort, or letting the stoke go cold? It’s all downhill from here in the best possible way — don’t miss the trail.
Gear for your content team filming this season: action camera mounts for MTB on Amazon
Sources: Sky Hi News (April 21, 2026), Pinkbike / Loam Pass expansion (April 29, 2026)
