Sugarbush's summit reaches 4,082 feet, dropping roughly 2,599 vertical feet to a base at 1,483 feet across 111 runs spread over 581 acres in Warren, Vermont, across two connected mountains. Terrain splits 42 per cent intermediate, 27 per cent advanced, 24 per cent beginner and 7 per cent expert, with average annual snowfall of roughly 177 inches. The resort carries Ikon and Mountain Collective pass affiliation. Thirteen lifts, including ten quad chairs and one double chair, serve the mountain's Lincoln Peak and Mount Ellen alongside two triple chairs and three surface lifts.

Sugarbush earned an early and enduring reputation for attracting sophisticated New York visitors to Vermont's remote Mad River Valley, a glamorous image that helped establish the resort as a genuine social and skiing destination from its earliest years. Its two connected mountains, Lincoln Peak and Mount Ellen, linked by the Slide Brook Express, give Sugarbush a considerable combined scale within the valley.

Damon and Sara Gadd, together with Jack Murphy, opened Sugarbush on 25 December 1958 after the Gadds moved to the Mad River Valley four years earlier. The Gadds took a genuinely innovative approach to resort development, installing the first enclosed Italian-built gondola in the United States, opening one of the country's first on-mountain apres-ski bars, the Wunderbar, and founding an international ski school, innovations that helped cement Sugarbush's fashionable early reputation.

The Gadds sold Sugarbush to Roy Cohen in 1977, and Cohen purchased the neighbouring Glen Ellen Ski Area, now Mount Ellen, in 1979, unifying the resort's two-mountain footprint. In 2001, Win Smith and a group of investors formed Summit Ventures NE LLC to purchase Sugarbush from the American Skiing Company, before Alterra Mountain Company acquired the resort in November 2019. Adult daily tickets run from 135 to 195 US dollars, with discounted access to Mount Ellen only.