Despite last winter’s mediocre snow year everywhere but in the West, U.S. ski areas set yet another record for skier visits. There are many reasons skiing and snowboarding are on the rise: multi-mountain passes, infrastructure improvements, better communication with guests, and yes, Covid. 

“Covid provided a big boost in visitation,” said Kari Roder, director of marketing at Boyne Mountain, Mich. “People fell in love with skiing. We’re trying to keep the momentum alive by offering smart pass products that provide value. Plus, we’re making big investments on the mountain.”

“Since Covid, we have seen record-breaking numbers for the past three years,” added Darcy Rowe Norfolk, director of communications at the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) and its three New York ski resorts, Whiteface, Gore, and Belleayre.

And it seems that ski areas across the country are preparing for another big year. 

THE MOMENTUM CONTINUES 

Even though the pandemic is technically over, the momentum continues. At Gunstock, N.H., marketing director Bonnie MacPherson said early season pass sales for this coming winter were up 15 percent in units sold and 21 percent in revenue as of the April 30 early pricing deadline. 

Norfolk also said pass sales are “once again on a record-breaking pace.”

At Ski Cooper, Colo., where visits have been increasing for several years, pass sales are also up.

“We typically do our early pass sale in July as a one-month deal,” said president and CEO Dan Torsell. “We’re up in both units and revenue. We’re staying on the right trend.”

Vail Resorts reported pass product sales through Sept. 22 increased about 7 percent in units and about 11 percent in sales dollars year-over-year. “Because of the variety of passes, much of our growth in pass sales has been the conversion of lift ticket purchasers to pass holders, meaning these are not all new guests,” noted Abigail Allen, communications manager for VR’s New Hampshire resorts (Attitash, Wildcat, Crotched, and Sunapee).

At Sun Valley, Idaho, spokesperson Stefanie Walters said, “Visitation has increased over the past couple of seasons, both from our pass holders using their pass more often and an increase of destination guests during holiday periods.”

White Pass, Wash., coming off a record season, sold out of its 2023-24 unlimited access pass this spring in just 10 days. It put the pass back on sale in September at a higher price and sold out in four days.

Early sales of the new Cali Pass, which includes Mountain High, Dodge Ridge, and China Peak in California, are also brisk, said CEO Karl Kapuscinski. “The Cali Pass is going well,” he said. “Our goal for it is about 60 percent of all passes. We’re running close to that right now.”

Kapuscinski said the Cali Pass “gives people another multi-mountain option to Epic and Ikon that’s affordable, and comes with all the good things and none of the bad.”

And momentum for the three ski areas is building. He said Dodge Ridge is coming off a huge record season—slightly more than 200,000 skier visits compared to the previous record of 170,000 many, many moons ago. “We’ve almost doubled visits there in two years,” said Kapuscinski, who acquired Dodge Ridge in 2021. 

China Peak would have had a record year if not for an 11-day road closure because of snow, and Mountain High had its best season in 10 years.        » continued 

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND CAPACITY MANAGEMENT 

Record crowds are indeed a good thing. Thanks to the value and guaranteed—often multi-mountain—access that season passes provide, more people than ever are enjoying the thrills of skiing and riding.

But record visits also bring crowded slopes and long lift lines, overflowing base lodges with long waits for food and other amenities, not enough parking, and traffic jams coming and leaving the mountain. Which brings us to “capacity management,” a growing emphasis at many resorts. 

One of the most common ways to manage capacity is to limit ticket sales, an increasingly common strategy. Gunstock, for example, limits the number of passes it sells as well as the number of day tickets.

“Tickets sold fluctuates based on a number of criteria: parking, mountain conditions, trail count, et cetera,” MacPherson said. “The concept of ‘record crowds,’ or crowding of any kind, is mitigated.”

Vail Resorts limits lift tickets every day of the season, noted Allen. 

On the flip side, Kapuscinski said both China Peak and Dodge Ridge have room to grow with no plans to limit ticket sales anytime soon.

“They each have more than 800-plus acres of skiing terrain, which have been underutilized the last few years. At some point, we will definitely put a lid on passes and day tickets when we need to.”

He said Mountain High is already at that point during extremely busy holiday periods or after big snowfalls.

“We did have to limit ticket sales there about seven or eight days over the Christmas holiday period,” said Kapuscinski. “It is much easier to control visits these days because we know how many pass holders will come. Our pass holders are very much a youth market. They come by car, and bring two or three buddies. We sell about 12,000 passes at Mountain High. I like that number. It’s been pretty steady. They’re pre-committed guests. We haven’t oversold our passes and can still sell day tickets.”

Resorts also manage visits by pushing off-peak passes.

“We continue to encourage off-peak attendance, and we are seeing results with continued increased attendance Monday, Thursday, and Friday,” said White Pass director of marketing and PR Kathleen Goyette. “This season, we will be looking at additional programs to push Tuesday and Wednesday visits.”

Norfolk said the three ORDA resorts will also continue to set target numbers for key times while driving increased midweek business. 

PARKING AND OTHER IMPROVEMENTS 

Resorts are also managing capacity and on-mountain flow through infrastructure improvements. Over the summer, Gunstock spent $6 million to renovate the Stockade Lodge and Summit Lodge and build a new two-level rental and repair shop near its Learning Center. The resort also redesigned its main parking lot, adding nighttime lighting and re-paving and lot striping to maximize parking capacity (read more on Gunstock’s projects in “Construction Site,” p. 54). 

Vail Resorts’ Lake Tahoe resorts are instituting paid parking and carpool incentives this winter to try to alleviate the growing traffic and parking issues on weekends and holidays. VR-owned Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont implemented similar measures in 2022. Sister resort Mount Snow, Vt., first introduced paid parking in 2021 to “improve the guest experience,” the company said, but doesn’t incentivize carpooling like the others.

Torsell said Ski Cooper also has limited parking, but with no room to grow those facilities anytime soon, has implemented strict parking procedures.

“We have a very organized parking plan,” he said. “We don’t just let people come in and haphazardly park. When I was young, I was blessed to be parking supervisor at Killington (Vt.) back when they were doing 1.2 million skier visits. I know how to park cars. We can get 30 or 40 percent more cars parking. We’ve been very diligent about it the last few years, and rarely park out.”

He said Ski Cooper was at a similar point with its base lodge facilities: “It’s just really, really tight.”

To help alleviate this, the resort is repurposing other areas—building a small lodge with decks and kitchen facilities at the top of the mountain, another small lodge at the base, and grilling outside on nice days. 

“It takes the burden off the main lodge,” Torsell said. “We’re trying to use every square inch of space for something. We’re nearing the end of that, and have plans in the works to expand the base lodge, but it’s a number of years out. At the moment, we’re doing OK.” 

ON-RESORT CIRCULATION 

Elsewhere, Boyne Mountain put in the eight-person Disciples 8 chair last winter and has replaced two more chairlifts for this season.

“This season is going to ski different,” Roder said. “The investment in new lifts is designed to spread guests out across the 415 skiable acres” and relieve pressure on its primary six-pack out of the base.

Roder said the resort has also expanded its dining facilities with multiple outdoor bars and food trucks. Plus, “We run more shuttles in the parking lots, organized the traffic flow, and have found ways to expand our parking,” she added.

Walters said Sun Valley also continues to invest in infrastructure and upgraded lifts and access to terrain to enhance on-mountain flow. For example, she said the Warm Springs enhancement, with the installation of two new lifts that are slated for completion in December, “will greatly improve skier circulation, which allows skier traffic to flow over a wider area of skiable terrain” (for more on Sun Valley’s improvements, see “Construction Site,” p. 54).

“These upgrades will improve lift quality, efficiency, and sustainability and provide multiple options for accessing the mountain from the Warm Springs area,” Walters said.

Managing access...it’s the new game in town.