Background

Vermont’s Smugglers’ Notch ski area is officially joining the Indy Pass for the 2026-27 ski season, adding one of the Northeast’s most prominent independent ski areas to the rapidly growing multi-resort product.

Indy Pass holders will receive two days of skiing or riding at Smugglers’ Notch, along with a third day at 25% off. There will be no blackout dates on either the Indy Base or Indy Plus Pass, although advance reservations will be required as part of Smugglers’ Notch’s capacity-management program.

The addition comes during Smugglers’ Notch’s first full winter under its new ownership structure. In February 2026, Bear Den Partners acquired a majority stake in the resort. Bear Den also owns and operates three other independent Northeast ski areas with Indy Pass access, including Burke, Berkshire East, and Catamount.

Smugglers’ Notch was the headlining addition in a major expansion of the Indy Pass roster for 2026-27. Indy says it has added 60 resorts since last season, bringing its network to 304 destinations across 15 countries and four continents (although only 256 of these are alpine ski areas, with the rest being cross-country nordic resorts). In the wake of the resort additions, Indy reopened pass sales to the general public on September 8, claiming they had additional capacity to do so after previously selling out.

Our Take

For anyone closely following the ski industry, Smugglers’ Notch joining the Indy Pass suite may have been one of the worst-kept secrets of the off-season.

Indy spent the week leading up to the announcement gradually revealing dozens of new partners while teasing a major final addition, and Smuggs was an obvious candidate. The resort had just been acquired by Bear Den Partners, whose portfolio already has substantial overlap with Indy Pass, making the eventual partnership feel less like a surprise than the finale to a carefully staged marketing rollout.

But predictability doesn’t make the addition insignificant. With Smugglers’ Notch onboard, Indy Pass now continues to build out its very compelling collection of independent ski areas across the Northeast. Smuggs joins destinations such as Jay Peak, Bolton Valley, Magic Mountain, Burke, Cannon, Saddleback, and numerous less-commercial mountains, meaning someone planning multiple Northeast weekend trips can now reach an impressively large percentage of the region’s most interesting non-Epic and non-Ikon mountains with one relatively inexpensive product.

There are, however, still some caveats. First, many Indy destinations retain exactly the type of old-school infrastructure that gives them their charm but also makes them less convenient than their corporate competitors. Smugglers’ Notch may be the ultimate example: its terrain is among the most compelling in Vermont, but its lift network remains dominated by slow, fixed-grip chairs. And unlike the other Indy resorts with slower lifts, Smuggs doesn’t even have any high-capacity chairs, still relying solely on double lifts.

Geography is another issue, with most of Indy’s headline Vermont destinations continuing to stay concentrated in the north of the state. Smugglers’ Notch, Jay Peak, Burke, and Bolton Valley all require substantial drives for skiers and riders coming from major U.S. metropolitan areas, particularly New York and Boston. Places like Magic, Berkshire East, and Catamount do offer easier drives, but they don’t offer the snow reliability (or, arguably, terrain) to compete with places like Killington, Sugarbush, and Stowe. Indy therefore works particularly well for a more-involved driving vacation, but it may be considerably less convenient for the skier or rider simply looking for a well-rounded weekend getaway.

And while Indy’s Northeast lineup is arguably stronger than ever, the same cannot necessarily be said nationwide. The pass has taken several significant losses in other regions heading into 2026-27. Lutsen, Granite Peak, and Snowriver—three of the Midwest’s largest destination ski areas—have left Indy and joined the Ikon ecosystem. A handful of other ski areas in Michigan and Wisconsin have chosen not to renew as well. The Pacific Northwest has also taken a hit, most notably with Mission Ridge dropping from the 2026-27 lineup, leaving a considerably weaker collection of larger Indy destinations for skiers and riders based around Seattle.

Ultimately, Smugglers’ Notch further establishes Indy as an attractive option in the Northeast. But this year’s departures raise questions as to whether the pass can stay compelling in other regions.

Considering a trip to the Northeast? Check out our Smugglers’ Notch review, as well as our East Coast ski resort rankings here.

Background

In the past week, two of Eastern North America’s busiest ski areas have announced massive expansions, though they have vastly different targets for the skiing demographics.

Both Loon in New Hampshire and Tremblant in Quebec have announced terrain expansions, though Tremblant’s is more of a re-announcement, as it’s basically the same project that was announced just a few days before the COVID pandemic threw a wrench in their plans. We’ll look through each of these plans individually, who they’ll benefit, and when you can expect to ski or ride this new terrain. 

Loon Black Ridge Expansion

Boyne’s Loon Mountain has long been the go-to mountain for Boston area day trippers, but has fallen short of other New England mountains in terms of advanced and expert terrain, especially gladed terrain. That’s exactly what the Black Ridge expansion aims at fixing. This 272-acre expansion consists entirely of tree terrain, depending entirely on natural snowfall and offering a “raw, natural, and untamed” experience, per Loon’s website. While a 272-acre expansion may not seem the largest for those used to the massive footprints of western ski areas, it measures in at a 67% increase in Loon’s skiable footprint, one of the largest ski area expansions in recent memory by that measurement. This terrain is located to the looker’s left of the North Peak terrain, and will be accessed by a 1.25 mile traverse, allowing skiers and riders plenty of options to choose their line. This expansion will be ready for the 2027-28 season.

Tremblant Timber Expansion

Up north of the border, Alterra’s Mont Tremblant will finally see an expansion that was first announced over six years ago, but was derailed by the COVID pandemic. Timber Summit is an eight trail expansion to the south of the main Mont Tremblant summit, and will eventually be served by a new high-speed quad, as well as a new beginner carpet and learning area at the Versant Soleil base. The trails off the Timber Summit will be largely beginner and intermediate focused, and will be fully covered with artificial snowmaking. This expansion will be broken up over the next two years, with the new learning area and carpet being ready for the 2026-27 winter, and the Timber high speed quad and full expansion being ready for the 2027-28 winter. 

Our Take

Loon Black Ridge Expansion

While these expansions are in a similar part of the continent, they couldn’t serve a more different purpose. Loon Mountain is taking aim at the advanced and expert skier demographic that has passed them by for years heading up to Cannon or into Vermont. This could lead to Loon getting more people taking shorter drives; however, it’s very hard to say how often this terrain will be open. New Hampshire generally gets much less snow than Vermont, and with this whole expansion depending on natural snowfall, the resiliency of this area is the main concern.

One additional concern is the lack of direct lift capacity to such a substantial amount of new terrain. Loon is already a very busy mountain with significant waits during peak times, and as of right now, the North Peak Express will be the only way to directly reach the traverse for these new glades. In other words, just one lift is likely to end up holding down access to nearly 45% of Loon’s entire skiable footprint. If Black Ridge does end up opening reliably, will the North Peak Express just turn into a huge chokepoint? 

This all being said, the need to traverse to such a substantial amount of the new terrain should help gatekeep it from too many crowds and naturally preserve the snow. Based on the topography, it also looks like some of Black Ridge may require a small amount of hiking to reach.

It is also worth noting that the new expansion will be indirectly paired with some capacity upgrades. While it won’t directly serve the new glade terrain, Loon is also planning to replace their four-passenger gondola with a 10-passenger variant, which should be a substantial improvement for the resort that we’ve detailed here.

Tremblant Timber Expansion

Tremblant, on the other hand, is focusing on expanding what they already do well: great family friendly terrain and a strong lift fleet. Timber doesn’t have anything you can’t already find at Tremblant, other than more sunny, south facing slopes, but it could lead to more people starting their day at the Versant Soleil base rather than the main Tremblant Village. One concern we do have about this expansion is all the trails from the expanded terrain seem to end on the L’Algonquin trail, which could lead to some very congested runs, especially since that’s already the main route down for beginners on that side of the mountain.

Overall, these are both positive additions to these busy Northeastern ski areas. They also collectively strengthen the Ikon pass for the region, as they’re both on that multi-mountain pass despite them being owned by different companies. Whether Loon will become the next glade skiing haven, or Tremblant will keep its place as one of the best ski areas for all abilities, only time will tell, but we’ll be sure to check these out once they’re fully open for the 2027-28 ski season.

Considering a trip to the Northeast? Check out our Loon and Tremblant reviews, as well as our East Coast ski resort rankings here.

Background

At a first glance, South America looks like it should have one of the greatest ski industries in the world. The continent’s Andes mountains are the tallest range on Earth outside Asia, with peaks of over 22,000 feet. This is paired with some of the stormiest weather patterns on the planet and incredible volcanic topography. And for those coming from the Northern Hemisphere, Chile and Argentina offer something almost nowhere else can: real winter in July and August.

And yet, when thinking about the world’s great ski regions, South America’s ski resorts don’t really live up to the quality of the Alps, the Rockies, or Japan. 

So why didn’t the Andes’ commercial ski industry develop to the level the terrain seemed to promise? The surface level explanation is economics—it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Chile and Argentina do not have the markets of places like Western Europe, Canada, or the United States.

But it goes much deeper than that. In reality, the conditions of the Andes created a barrage of factors so difficult that it would be hard to imagine this part of the world developing top-tier ski resorts even if it were the wealthiest on the planet.

In this piece, we’ll dig into the extensive history of South American skiing’s development and associated hiccups, including its earliest origins, the surprising barrage of investments along the way, and the problems that influenced which resorts got built at all—and what they had to become to survive. Let’s jump right into it.

South American Skiing’s Beginnings

The first thing to understand about South American skiing is its timing of origin. And perhaps surprisingly, the industry didn’t really start all that much later than better-known regions in the Northern Hemisphere.

The earliest documented skiing on the continent was in the context of labor. In the late 1880s, workers began building a train line across the Andes to link Chile and Argentina, through some of the most punishing terrain on the continent. To move and work through the deep snow, the engineers and laborers got around on skis, the only practical way to cross the high cordillera in winter. When the line opened to the public in 1910, recreational skiers began riding the train up toward the Caracoles pass and skiing back down, which made the Trans-Andean railway, in effect, Chile’s first ski lift.

While the railway was planting skiing’s first seeds, immigration was providing the next source that would grow the sport. Recreational alpine skiing largely arrived through a professional class of Western European transplants, with Germans driving the club culture on both sides of the Andes. In Chile, their community founded excursion clubs in Valparaíso in 1909 and Santiago in 1924, and by 1929 they had affiliated as the Chilean chapter of the German-Austrian Alpine Club. In Argentina, German and Swiss immigrants brought the sport to the mountain town of Bariloche, which had been a hub for sightseeing and trading beforehand but quickly became popular for skiing as well.

At that point in time, getting to the snow was its own expedition in Chile. Above Santiago, the club skiers gathered in the city, rode horse-drawn coaches up the Mapocho valley, swapped out the team partway, then finished on foot or by mule before skinning up and skiing down. There was no lift and no ski-specific road at this point, making for a rather arduous journey. Around Bariloche, Argentina it was quite a bit easier, as the skiing happened on Cerro Otto right by town until at least 1930.

So by the end of the 1920s, immigration had built a regional interest in winter sports in Chile and Argentina. But what it hadn’t built was a single piece of mechanized uphill transportation. However, that wasn’t unusual yet. Almost nowhere had real ski resorts in the 1920s, and the sport still meant climbing up under your own power to ski down.

1930s & 40s: Resorts Start to Get Built

By the 1930s, things began to change. Like in North America and Europe, skiing in the Andes transformed from backcountry excursion into a truly practical recreational activity during this decade.

Farellones, the small village above Santiago, became Chile’s first real metropolitan ski setting over the course of the decade. Starting in around 1934, a cluster of club and private refuges allowed for skiers to finally stay directly on the mountain after years of using a lower-elevation staging point. Then by the end of the decade, a road up to the village was finished,and it was complemented by the construction of a crude tractor-engine rope tow. These developments went a long way toward adding a comfort proposition to the skiing experience in the area.

Argentina’s anchor resort showed up around the same time, and it was actually spearheaded in large part by the country’s government. With the help of an Austrian ski champion and a new national parks agency created a few years earlier, Cerro Catedral debuted in 1938. The state cut in roads and strung the first drag lifts, while the army helped clear the forested slopes. A ski hotel opened in 1942. It is worth touching on why the Argentine government had such an appetite for building a ski resort. Yes, there was a small cluster of locals who skied there, but there was not a paying crowd worthy of private investment. Instead, the government was concerned that Bariloche’s existing frontier-based economy leaned too heavily towards Chile, and a ski resort grand enough to pull the Buenos Aires elite south was an ideal way to hedge against that.

It’s also worth noting that Cerro Catedral’s location selection would be a sign of the scarce pickings to come in the future. The parks agency’s expert had originally preferred a different mountain entirely, but it was rejected once it became clear there was no way to reach it except a boat across a lake.

Then, South American skiing showed up in what might seem in the present day to be a wild card country. In 1939, a rope tow powered by an automobile engine went up at Chacaltaya, Bolivia, above La Paz. This tow sat at a staggering base elevation of 17,100 feet, and for decades, Bolivia held a strange distinction as home to the highest lift-served skiing on Earth. The lift sat on a tropical glacier, which would matter enormously later down the line.

1940s & 50s: Problems Arise

Over the next few decades, and especially after World War II, ski resort development exploded throughout much of the world. However, the 1940s and 50s were when South America’s structural problems really started to surface.

In the early 1940s, South American alpine skiing started to revolve around a surprisingly practical circumstance: the military. For Chile and Argentina, the Andes not only provide a mountain backdrop but are the literal border between the two countries. In order to defend that border, soldiers needed to know how to move through and survive in snowy, wintry conditions, and operate in places where roads could disappear for months. So what would be the perfect military solution? Skiing, of course.

In Chile, the Army’s high-mountain school was established at the site of Portillo in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In Argentine Patagonia, the Army’s Mountain Regiment 21 near Esquel built the first refuges and trails on what would eventually become the La Hoya ski area.

In Argentina, the biggest development was arguably Catedral becoming a mature ski resort. After the first lifts and hotel were put in place in the late 30s and early 40s, by 1950 the resort had an aerial cable lift—the first of its kind in South America. Meanwhile, a few hundred kilometers north, the future Chapelco was being born the hard way. A club of skiers from nearby San Martín de los Andes built a refuge in 1948, and cleared the first run by machete in 1953. Chapelco would later get its first chairlift in the 1960s.

Over in Chile, the Santiago cluster inched along in terms of development as well. The road up to Farellones had been pushed through around 1939, largely on private initiative, and the first real lift at what became El Colorado arrived in the 1950s. Much further south, there was a ski club and a refuge on Villarrica, which is home to the present-day Pillán ski resort, by 1948.

But while these handful of locations were showing promise in this part of the 20th century, they also happened to be the only resorts that were fairly easily accessible by road. With Villarrica and the Argentine resorts having base elevations of about 3,000-4,500 feet, constructing access roads was not all that tough from the nearby towns. And for Farellones, while it sat much higher at an elevation of 7,800 feet, it was one of the few places where building a road, even if it had dozens of switchbacks, was topographically practical to do, and it benefitted from the economic advantage of having Santiago immediately below (there was simply too much demand from the Santiago region to go without having any skiing, and Farellones was the easiest choice of all the mountains in the vicinity).

Unfortunately, the same wouldn’t be true in other parts of the Andes. While getting the Chilean Army up to Portillo for mandatory training was one thing, convincing the general public to go up there for leisure purposes was another. And the resort had one crippling problem: into the 1960s, the only way in was that six-hour narrow-gauge train from Santiago that had existed since the early 20th century, and the train regularly got stuck in the snow high in the mountains. The first attempt to build a hotel up there was in the 1940s, but the developer went bankrupt before being rescued by the state and finished in 1949. The resort had built a couple of chairlifts by the 1950s and hired world-class instructors to attract international tourists, but it still struggled immensely due to its location.

It was also in this time period that the volcanic nature of the Andes would rear its ugly head. In October 1948, Villarrica erupted violently, and the eruption completely destroyed the ski club’s refuge. Tragically, the eruption took the lives of two of its caretakers and contributed to a broader disaster that killed roughly 50 to 100 people in the region. It would be decades before the mountain saw serious ski development again.

By 1960, after roughly 75 years of skiing in the Andes, South America had only a handful of real ski resorts, and one of them could only be reached by an unreliable train. And it was becoming clear that with terrain this steep, high, and remote, roads were brutally expensive and slow to build, and a great mountain was extraordinarily difficult to develop without them.

The Fundamental Problem With the Andes

So what exactly were the factors that made the Andes so brutal and difficult to build ski infrastructure in, and how do we know they weren’t just a symptom of South America’s poorer economies?

Start with a fact of geography that, in most other cases, would frankly make some of the South American resorts that did materialize physically impossible in most other situations: latitude. Santiago sits at 33 degrees south, which is the same distance from the equator as San Diego. At that latitude, snow typically doesn’t show up at all. But because the Andes are so high, reliable snow actually does come starting at around 7,500 to 9,000 feet. However, this also means the resorts of the central Andes have to sit with base areas far higher than their population centers, with the feasible mountains and the cities separated by roughly 6,000 vertical feet of rapidly-rising, not-insignificant terrain to cross.

And even if the access problem is solvable, the mountains offer little relief higher up, because the Andes overshoot in the other direction as well. As we mentioned earlier, the range is one of the tallest on earth, with a huge share of its terrain rising well past the roughly 13,000-foot ceiling where the lifts of the Rockies and Alps stop, and toward summits above 20,000. At a first glance, this is the type of vertical rise that should make for truly world-class slopes and, in the process, potentially attract enough attention to outweigh the practical constraints of constructing roads.

But there’s another reason why virtually every major resort on earth stops its lifts around 13,000 feet: above that, there isn’t enough oxygen for the average person to ski comfortably, let alone sleep. So in other words, the Andes get squeezed from both ends. Too warm for snow to reliably accumulate below about 7,500 feet, but too thin-aired above about 13,000. The actual usable band for a ski resort is a narrow shelf partway up a gigantic wall.

And even ignoring the elevation, reaching that shelf is its own nightmare. The Andes are a steep, loose, jagged range that’s still tectonically active, making for much more unstable terrain than places like even the Rockies or Alps. Many slopes that would make spectacular ski runs are simply too steep and too avalanche-prone to put a road under or a chairlift on. And even where a road is possible, it might have to climb through passes so high, or so exposed to avalanche terrain, that driving it in winter would be too dangerous in and of itself to make it practical.

1960s: Serious Problems Emerge & Portillo Takes Center Stage

Going into the 1960s, some of these issues started to collapse onto resorts that already existed.

In 1961, the Chilean government had given up on Portillo after more than a decade of losing money on it, and put the whole thing up for auction. Exactly one bid came in, from a pair of New York investors, Bob Purcell and Dick Aldrich. When their manager arrived to take over, he found the hotel all but abandoned. The new owners’ plan to turn it around was audacious: put Portillo on the world stage by winning the rights to host the 1966 Alpine World Ski Championships, an event that had never been held anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Remarkably, the bid succeeded. However, hurdles stood in the way—some known, others impossible to predict.

At that time, the resort still had no road and remained fully dependent on that narrow-gauge train line. And unfortunately, the rest of its infrastructure was about to be tested in the worst possible way.

Roughly a year before the 1966 World Championships, national teams gathered at Portillo for a pre-championship test event, and tragedy struck the Andes again. A gigantic storm cycle buried Portillo under winds over 100 miles an hour and several feet of snow a day. What followed were a series of catastrophic avalanches that effectively destroyed the resort, ripping out most of the newly installed lifts and flattening part of the staff housing. Sadly, several people among the trapped ski teams were killed. The resort had to rebuild almost its entire lift network in under a year, just to hold the event it had spent years chasing.

But when it came to said event, they actually pulled it off. The 1966 World Championships were held successfully, and still remain the only edition ever hosted in the Southern Hemisphere. For two weeks, a resort that had nearly been abandoned and then nearly been destroyed became the center of the skiing world. It’s still the high-water mark of South America’s global relevance to competitive skiing, and nothing on the continent has matched it since.

Also notable was just how Portillo rebuilt its lifts following the 1965 destruction. The resort brought in the strange slingshot lifts it still runs today, va-et-vient systems that fling four or five riders up an avalanche-terrain slope at once while leaving almost nothing standing for the next storm to take down. It was perhaps the clearest example thus far in the 20th century of the Andes’ relentless topography forcing infrastructure innovations.

Everywhere else, the 1960s largely added lifts to resorts that already existed rather than creating new ones. Chapelco finally strung its first chairlift in 1963, more than a decade after volunteers had cleared its runs by hand. Catedral kept growing on the strength of the town beneath it, which was healthily attracting the Argentines the government had intended to with its initial development. The Santiago cluster kept filling in, with La Parva formalizing lifts above the slopes the German club had skied since the thirties, although that was merely elite Santiago money funding chairlifts next to an existing road. Despite these advancements on existing footprints, one could reasonably argue that not one major ground-up destination resort opened anywhere in South America in the entire decade.

1970s & 80s: A New Boom

But that wouldn’t be the end of development in the South American ski scene. No, despite the logistical barriers, a facet would jumpstart development in all the remaining feasible enclaves of the Andes: demand that couldn’t be ignored.

By the late 1970s, Argentina’s middle class had taken up the sport in numbers, with the sport trickling down from the elites it had been built around in that country. There wasn’t really a Chilean mass-market boom comparable to Argentina’s, but several factors made demand increase anyway; upper-class Brazilians were discovering the Andes, and by extension, skiing and snowboarding, as a novel choice for a winter vacation, and advances in jet travel had put the Southern Hemisphere’s winter within reach of the north’s summer. Lift lines at the existing resorts, especially in Bariloche, were out of control.

The first harbinger of the demand boom to come showed up on a much smaller scale a decade before the trend truly became clear. La Hoya, above Esquel, finally opened a chairlift in 1974, thirty years after the Army built its first refuges. The provincial government decided to develop the resort as a public works project.

But Argentina at large was so politically chaotic in the 1970s and 80s that the era’s biggest project only happened because one entrepreneur decided to build the roads and the airport himself. The country’s flagship project during this era was Las Leñas, the vision of a burger empire mogulwho reportedly dreamed it up while standing in an endless Catedral lift line. After considering many areas, the remote Las Leñas valley won on terrain and the ability to construct a feasible access road. But while a road was possible to build, it didn’t exist yet, and the Las Leñas developers had to finance 20 kilometers of one with no help from the government. There was no airport, so the developers built the Malargüe airport too, through a scheme that let companies offset taxes with infrastructure works. Construction started in January 1982, but the Falklands War severed the European supply lines within months and nearly killed the project. However, the resort opened anyway in June 1983, with three chairlifts and three hotels, months before Argentina’s military dictatorship collapsed. So thanks to its workable access logistics and the brute force development, Las Leñas still made it despite so many economic factors working against it.

In Chile, a dictatorship built on foreign capital and privatization, despite its horrific atrocities, did end up creating the investment conditions that made an internationally-financed destination ski resort possible. Valle Nevado was conceived and financed by French investors, with the Chilean state pitching in the one piece no private actor was willing to foot the bill for: extending the access road. It only had to be an extension, because the route to Farellones already existed. Valle Nevado opened in 1988, and it went not to a fresh mountain range but to an extension of the one road the central Andes already had. And unlike La Parva and El Colorado, the new resort was built with accommodations that were truly meant to attract hotel guests, rather than the “second home” setups of those already existing resorts.

Then, there were a handful of ski resorts developed out of interest in a completely different winter draw: hot springs. In 1986, back under democracy, the Argentine province of Neuquén founded the town of Caviahue by decree, a planned tourism base pairing skiing and riding on the Copahue volcano with the thermal springs next door. Developing here in the volcano belt was a workaround to many of the structural issues we mentioned earlier: far enough south that the snowline dropped to drivable elevations, with a base around 5,400 feet, gentle cone gradients that were easier to build roads and lifts on, and at least some araucaria forest for wind shelter in the lower mountain. Chile had a much bigger version of this idea executed at Termas de Chillán, a hot-springs resort two centuries old where skiing had been a bathers’ pastime since the 1930s but only got its first real lift in the 1980s. Because the spa’s hotels and road had already been there, investing in a new ski resort in this location, which was later rebranded as Nevados de Chillán, was a lot easier than in many other alpine areas. And finally, lift-served skiing arrived on Villarrica, the volcano that had erased its first ski refuge in the 1948 eruption, in the form of the Pucón ski resort.

1990s & 2000s: Rounding Out the Map

By the 1990s, the South American ski scene as we know it today was rounding out. Two more resorts opened in this era, and both arguably got built during this time period only because it took so long to make the practical realities for them happen.

In 1999, we saw the debut of the world’s southernmost ski resort: Cerro Castor. At 54 degrees south, the same distance from the equator as Moscow, reliable snow falls almost to sea level. As a result, Castor’s base sits around 640 feet, thousands of feet lower than every other notable lift-served resort on the continent. But it didn’t have an easy origin story; after being originally proposed in the mid-1980s, the resort’s exceptionally southern and remote location warranted extensive flight studies and meteorological analysis to make it a reality, while political instability in Argentina hurt the timeline as well. But since its inception, the resort has become a critical athlete training ground for its surprising ease of access, being only half an hour from the Ushuaia airport, as well as its consistent snowfall and reliably cold temperatures.

Corralco was the other major resort debut, opening on the flanks of Volcán Lonquimay in Chile in the early 2000s. Like the other volcanic ski areas built in this region, it was far enough south for a drivable base elevation, and on a mountain gentle enough to put in lifts. Corralco faced several constraints in its development, sitting inside a protected national reserve, and strict environmental oversight made for slow on-mountain buildout, with the first on-mountain hotel not arriving until 2013. Even today, the footprint sits only on a fraction of its host volcano, as well as strictly outside the araucaria forests that would make for some incredible tree skiing but are sacred to the region’s indigenous Mapuche-Pehuenche people.

Why South American Resorts Can’t Expand Any Further

But even aside from the development constraints, this all points at the fundamentals the vast majority of these resorts have in common, old and new alike: they are modest in size. The Andean terrain put severe restrictions on how big any of the resorts could actually get. In the Alps, resorts grew by linking valleys, one lift-served basin connecting to the next, creating huge networks of hundreds of kilometers of terrain and dozens of towns and villages. Even in the Rockies, multiple mountains right next to each other could be skied in their entirety from top-to-bottom and linked together to create giant destination ski resorts. The Andes almost never allow that. The usable band of skiable elevation does not include either the highest or lowest elevations, and the terrain between good zones is usually too steep, too avalanche-exposed, or too high to bridge with lifts. So most ski mountains are effectively “islands” in the sense of connecting to other practical skiable terrain.

There’s pretty much one real exception: the Tres Valles, where Valle Nevado, La Parva, and El Colorado sit on the same broad, forgiving massif above Santiago, physically connected across roughly 4,000 skiable acres. That’s genuinely big, on par with a major North American mountain. It’s arguably the single goldilocks spot on the continent where topography wouldn’t hold a large resort back, and even that’s only because demand from nearby Santiago justified building a road up to it, albeit one that could only be built with thousands of feet of elevation gain, dozens of switchbacks, and a capacity-constraining narrow width that warrants one-way travel restrictions during peak times.

And even in some cases, resorts that did successfully get built were eventually ground back down by the mountains themselves. When it debuted in the 1980s, Pucón was built on the volcano’s north face, which in the Southern Hemisphere is the sun-facing side during the winter. It was also at a low elevation in a rainy maritime climate with an extraordinarily windy exposure, and the combination slowly ate it alive. Over the following decades the resort shrank in place, with several lifts gradually removed from the map—including, according to an early brochure, a slingshot lift similar to the ones that now only exist at Portillo—and even a large chunk of the lifts that still exist are seldom running today. Unfortunately, some areas that likely could have survived with surface lifts met their demise because the resort made the mistake of installing chairlifts instead. On the same volcano that had erased the area’s first ski refuge in the 1948 eruption, the decline of what is now Pillán sent a warning about Mother Nature a second time, albeit slowly instead of all at once. Although ironically, the resort probably only exists today because of its inopportune exposure, as in 2015, the volcano erupted once again, with the lava flowing down the southeastern flank.

Over in Argentina, Las Leñas found itself unable to maintain its upper mountain Juno chairlift, relocating it to the lower mountain and removing approximately 30% of its lift-served terrain in the process, with the conditions in the area making the lift extremely difficult to operate. Unfortunately, this move effectively took away some of the best advanced and expert-level slopes on the continent. 

And then, we have to revisit Bolivia. Chacaltaya had always been the continent’s great anomaly, a ski area operating above 17,000 feet, far past the altitude ceiling that stops every other resort on earth, and it got away with it for one reason: La Paz sat just below, one of the highest major cities in the world, supplying a clientele already living and breathing at extreme elevation, up a road that existed because the city did. But the lift sat on a tropical glacier rather than a seasonal snowpack, and when the glacier melted away in its entirety in 2009, the ski slopes went with it.

The Economic Question

So with everything we’ve covered so far, there’s one obvious counterargument: couldn’t it just be economics that have put a throttle on South American ski resort development? Yes, governments and economic conditions have not always made building or expanding in Chile and Argentina as easy as it could be.

The most prominent and recent example of this may have to do with the potential of the Tres Valles region. Mountain Capital Partners, an American operator, spent the last three years buying up two of the three Tres Valles resorts, first securing a majority stake in Valle Nevado in 2023,then La Parva in 2024. The company then had a plan to purchase El Colorado as well, connecting all three resorts and eventually building out what was claimed to eventually become the largest ski area in the Western Hemisphere. But in July 2026, the plan reached a fatal hurdle. Chile’s antitrust regulator ruled that letting one company control all three connected areas was too much, and demanded that one be owned by a competitor. As a result, MCP was forced to walk away from the El Colorado deal. So even in the one place on the continent where a truly world-class, interconnected mega-resort is physically possible, it still hasn’t been allowed to happen because of the regulators (although one could plausibly understand why a Chilean government entity might not want a foreign company to own all three of its most prominent resorts).

Also, severely unfavorable long-term financing rates have significantly complicated the ability of resorts to install or replace their lifts. With no lift manufacturers based anywhere on the continent, every chairlift in South America is an imported product, making for extraordinarily high shipping and installation costs. Indeed, lifts are rudimentary by the standards of the regions South America is measured against. While the first high-speed gondola did make its debut at Chapelco in 1983, which was early for this type of investment, the first high-speed detachable chairlift didn’t arrive until Cerro Catedral installed one in 1997, decades after they became standard in the Alps and North America. The first Chilean ski resort to get a high-speed lift was Valle Nevado in 2001, and the second, Corralco, didn’t get a detachable until, unbelievably, 2025.

However, these factors don’t explain everything. Take surface lifts, which Andean resorts still heavily rely on and are often cited as the clearest evidence of a cash-starved industry. But while this cheap, wind-tolerant, easily repaired hardware is certainly favored by economics, many terrain areas at South American ski resorts are far too wind exposed to run anything else. In fact, several resorts that do have chairlifts often have surface lifts as backups in case of severe wind. And this is a phenomenon that is not unique to South America, with regions like New Zealand, Australia, and the European Alps also relying heavily on surface lifts for their most exposed terrain. 

Sure, one could argue that better financing access and friendlier construction policy would have produced more modern packages. But a better economy still wouldn’t have produced—over the significant time window under which the industry has existed—more ski resorts, because nobody has found anywhere new to practically put one, even with far better resources.

The Terrain That Never Became A Resort

But with so much snowy terrain across the continent that would never be practical for ski resort development, is the rest of it simply sitting dormant? Well, it turns out that while a significant portion of the Andes is too compromised for traditional ski resort development, South America is a huge destination for more boutique vacations.

Across both Chile and Argentina, a scattering of heli-ski and snowcat operations work terrain that never got lift service. Valle Nevado runs one of the Southern Hemisphere’s premier heli operations from its base, reaching tens of thousands of acres beneath 17,000-foot peaks. Las Leñas runs a similar operation as well. Ski Arpa, in the Aconcagua valley of Chile, is cat-skiing only, with no traditional lifts at all. And further south in Argentina, El Azufre exists solely as a cat and heli operation; while it technically sits along a major border crossing between Argentina and Chile, the pass is closed all winter, and the only way to make it up the final stretch of the pass road is to be snowcatted in. But while these opportunities may look very appealing to those searching for an ultra-luxury vacation, the truth is each of these heli and cat-ski terrain zones arrived there because it was the only way they could feasibly be developed. Skiing or riding above 13,000 feet, dropping into extremely slide-prone terrain, relying on slopes that would go on storm hold at a traditional resort more than half the time, and being off roads that are impassable during the winter would never be practical for a normal ski area, but they can still work in the world of guided snowsports experiences.

Final Thoughts

So this is the story of how South American skiing arrived, and why it remains so frustratingly stagnant. A scattered handful of desirable ski mountains, each developed in the one narrow window where snow, oxygen, access, and demand happened to overlap, each capped in size by the same topography that made it feasible in the first place.

And to see every one of the region’s problems operating at once, you don’t have to look far. The 2026 season has brought some of the most relentless accumulation of any winter in South American history, which on the surface would suggest an incredible ski season. But in reality, the resorts are struggling to function. Portillo’s access highway was continually shut down due to snow for over a month starting from July 14. The Tres Valles access road closed for nearly a week in July as well, with hours-long backups in the days following. And further south, while the access road conditions have been significantly less of a factor, the prominence of those heavily-volcano-based mountains has brought extraordinary wind and partial or full resort closures, while a non-trivial chunk of the lower-mountain accumulation has fallen as rain.

Sure, it’s easy to blame economics here. But give this same mountain range to the wealthiest country on earth and it still runs into the same fundamental issues. Ultimately, the Andes are quite an exceptional place to ski or ride, but the same can’t be said for building out the infrastructure needed to make that happen.

Background

On Tuesday, Vail Resorts announced “Epic Experience,” a multi-year plan that CEO Rob Katz is framing as a new era for the company, one built around guest experience rather than pass sales and acquisitions.

The announcement spans five self-proclaimed pillars, which can essentially be broken down as the following: food, lessons, gear rentals, digital engagement, and staffing. The flashiest piece is a food overhaul at 15 destination resorts, where Vail says it will upgrade its most popular menu items, such as chili, burgers, pizza, fries, chicken fingers, and mac and cheese, with higher-quality ingredients and, notably, an explicit promise that prices won’t rise beyond normal inflation next season.

On the lessons side, Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek will convert all private lessons this winter to a new premium tier called Epic Ascent, which bundles a dedicated trip concierge, white-glove gear rental, and high-touch support, with more resorts to follow in 2027-28. The connected ski-and-ride-school experience in the My Epic app expands from four resorts to 14.

On the rental side, Vail is continuing its previously-announced move to fold several my My Epic Gear features, including online model selection, BOA boots, and step-on bindings, into regular demo rentals at 12 resorts, without the membership fee.

Vail looks to be investing quite a lot in its digital guest experience. Starting this fall, guests can buy passes and lift tickets and share Epic Friend Tickets directly in the My Epic app, with Apple Pay and Google Pay coming. Lessons and rentals also move in-app ahead of 2027-28, along with AI-driven trip planning. And on the staffing side, Vail points to its $175 million wage-and-benefits investment as the foundation of a fully staffed, more service-oriented frontline workforce.

Nothing in the release announces new lifts, new terrain, or changes to pass and ticket pricing.

Our Take

On the surface, the changes to the food structure might look like the biggest part of the announcement. But read a little bit more closely, and you’ll see something much more consequential, which is Rob Katz now saying that the Epic Pass and the acquisitions are “not the end goal.”

For nearly two decades, the pass and the acquisition machine have been the strategy. The company has bought over two dozen resorts in the past two decades, and for quite awhile, it was able to funnel those acquisitions to aggressively grow Epic Pass units. This all made Vail the largest ski company on earth, driving the stock to roughly $370 at its 2021 peak.

But now, that stock now trades at less than half that. Per Vail’s own April 23 metrics release, season-to-date skier visits across its North American resorts and ski areas were down 14.9% through April 19 versus the prior year. Pass unit growth has stalled to the point that Vail is offering 20% discounts to skiers under 30 just to keep young buyers in the system.

So where does growth come from now? Look at what every pillar in this release actually is: a lever to extract more revenue per guest. Concierge private lessons. Premium rentals bookable in-app. Passes, tickets, lessons, and food increasingly routed through the My Epic app, where Vail controls the storefront and the data.

And as we noted a few months ago, none of this should surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. Back in November, Vail hired Lululemon’s Celeste Burgoyne as its first-ever Chief Revenue Officer—a role, effective this past January, that Vail said makes her “directly responsible for the majority of the Company’s revenue,” spanning marketing, the guest journey, and the digital experience. You don’t really need an executive who scaled a retail company like Lululemon in order to buy more mountains. No, you need her to help with customer conversion.

The first thing that comes to mind here is the company’s impending My Epic app updates. By allowing guests to purchase passes and lift tickets with Apple Pay and Google Pay, Vail is removing friction from the checkout process, which is a classic conversion rate optimization tactic. If someone can complete a purchase with a quick Apple Pay confirmation instead of digging out a credit card and manually entering payment information, they’re substantially less likely to have something come up that causes them to drop off from the purchase.

Now, about those burgers. Vail’s one concrete food example is a “butcher’s blend burger with melted New School American Cheese and pecan-smoked bacon on a griddled brioche bun, with waffle fries and a house comeback sauce.” Count the premium-signaling modifiers in that sentence. “Butcher’s blend” has no fixed culinary meaning. Every brioche bun that has ever touched a flat-top is “griddled.” A “signature comeback sauce” will probably be some variety of mayonnaise and ketchup with some relish.

A tried-and-true move has long existed across the restaurant industry: keep the food roughly the same, upgrade the adjectives, and let the menu copy do the work of the kitchen. We’re not saying this is what’s happening here, as Vail does explicitly state that it will be investing in higher-quality ingredients. But here’s something to note: Vail quantifies its wage investment to the dollar—$175 million—but the food investment is only ever described as “significant.” So it remains to be seen just how much nicer the newer ingredients will actually be.

To give Vail a bit more credit, the release contains an explicit, on-the-record pricing commitment, which is that the food improvements next season “will not come with higher prices, beyond normal inflation” (which, by the way, is something we can fully intend to check for ourselves next winter).

But note the fine print. “Beyond normal inflation” is doing heavy lifting—mountain dining prices have outrun CPI for years, so whose “normal” are we using? Holding prices steady on the most expensive on-mountain food in North America isn’t necessarily a gift if the prices were already outrageous to begin with. Keeping a $12 slice of pizza at the same price adjusted for inflation is not going to win that many people back, even if it is now a “gourmet” offering. Also, the commitment covers next season only, with no word on 2027-28.

Given the lower price point of Epic than Ikon, Vail’s customer base now skews more price-sensitive than that of Ikon-affiliated destination resorts, and after two rough seasons, jacking up food prices under cover of “elevation” would be a self-inflicted wound. We are cautiously optimistic that this is the real investment the release claims, although it still seems that if you couldn’t stomach the price tag of last year’s cafeteria food, you won’t be able to next season either.

It’s also worth touching on price sensitivity in looking at the new “Epic Ascent” product. In making this rebrand for its private lessons, it looks as if Vail is trying to attract higher net worth customers who spend more across lodging, dining, lessons, and rentals, but perhaps more importantly, is less likely to drop out of the ecosystem in the event of bad weather.

Two other notable things from this release. First, the My Epic Gear integration is arguably a flop dressed as a rollout. Dropping the $50 membership fee and folding the features into standard demo rentals is what you do when a standalone membership product didn’t sell.

Second, the on-snow section of this release commits to nothing. While this may not be the biggest surprise, especially given that a few investments have already been announced in previous months, the company is still far behind where it needs to be in order to address an aging lift fleet, with over two dozen detachable lifts that are now over 30 years old, or beyond their useful lives. The company will really need to start ramping up beyond a handful of new chairs a year to stay competitive in this regard.

Vail’s CEO just told us the pass era is over and the experience era has begun. Whether “experience” means a genuinely better day on the mountain or just fancier text on the menu board is the question we’ll be answering, on the ground, all next season.

This past North American ski season was certainly a memorable one, perhaps more than anything because of the weather. But it turns out a lot more than weather unpredictability developed within the ski scene this year, with several more permanent shifts debuting this season that carry major implications for the years to come.

As part of the capital investments at dozens of resorts during the 2025-26 season, several mountains have seen significant changes to overall experiences, and we’ve updated our Mountain Scores to reflect that appropriately. Most of these updates are tied to real changes in guest experience across the resort landscape, but in a few cases, we’ve re-calibrated things to better capture the strengths and weaknesses of certain mountains. In this piece, we’re breaking down all the updates so you have everything you need to plan next winter’s ski trip. We’ll start with our 2026 score changes, and then we’ll go through our new overall North American rankings.

Score Adjustments due to Upgrades

Deer Valley

Size Score Change: 7 to 9

Resiliency Score Change: 8 to 6

We’ll start with the biggest overhaul of the season, and that was inarguably at Deer Valley. This Utah resort completed the second phase of its massive Expanded Excellence project, which began in the 2024-25 season with three new lifts and a 300-acre terrain expansion. But this season, the changes were far more substantial, with over 2,000 additional acres being brought into the footprint, consisting of nearly 80 new trails of all ability levels and terrain types. Seven new lifts were added to serve those trails, including six new detachable chairlifts and a top-to-bottom 10-passenger gondola. The East Village base area was also expanded after its initial opening in 2024-25, and some of the lower sections of the new terrain serve new ski-in ski-out real estate. Additionally, the layout of the new part of the footprint makes it much easier to take advantage of the resort’s full vertical drop, 3,000 feet of which can now be skied in just one run (and lapped by just one lift, the gondola).

However, this season’s conditions did not allow the project to have the most ideal debut. The new terrain bottoms out at a low elevation of 6,350 feet, and many of the trails face unfavorable aspects for snow preservation. Deer Valley invested hugely in snowmaking infrastructure to keep the terrain consistent, but for much of the winter, conditions in Utah were so unseasonably warm that even snowmaking couldn’t do much. As a result, white ribbon trails surrounded by mountainsides of bare dirt weren’t an uncommon sight at the resort this season. The conditions were so poor that two of the new lifts – the Pioche Express and Neptune Express – along with all the trails they serve, never opened at all, and the entire resort closed in mid-March.

While it’s hard to foresee future seasons being as catastrophic as this one was, the fact remains that this new terrain’s elevation and aspect hurts the resiliency of the overall Deer Valley footprint. We have no doubt Deer Valley’s top-of-the-line snowmaking arsenal will help, but given just how much of the raw footprint is now comprised of this expansion terrain (as well as a few broader circumstances we are now taking into account for Utah’s lower elevation resorts that we’ll discuss later in this video), we are dropping the resort’s resiliency score from an 8 to a 6. That being said, the expansion’s raw acreage numbers also warrant a positive change, with the full resort now being over 4,000 acres in size, so we’re also raising the size score from a 7 to a 9.

It’s also worth touching on a few smaller changes that don’t budge our scores for the resort, but are still notable. For example, some of the new construction and lower-mountain development could be described as an eyesore by some, but some of the new upper mountain areas provide gorgeous inbounds views, leading to a situation where the mountain aesthetic score averages out to be the same for now. Additionally, most of the new trails that opened this winter didn’t feel especially different from last year’s footprint, with much of the new terrain consisting of intermediate cruising trails similar to what the resort already offered. The Pinyon Express pod has some interesting bowl-like terrain for beginners, which does add slightly more to the terrain mix, but in our view it’s not quite enough to justify raising the terrain diversity score, at least not yet.

Snowbasin

Lifts Score Change: 7 to 8

But Deer Valley isn’t the only source of a notable score change from the state of Utah. Snowbasin also made a substantial upgrade for the 2025-26 season, replacing its lower-mountain Becker triple chair with a new high-speed quad in a very similar alignment. With this replacement, Snowbasin is now almost entirely served by high-speed lifts, with only one fixed-grip chairlift remaining (albeit a very long one) accessing a relatively small number of runs. The new Becker lift halves the ride time of the old one, which was a mind-numbing 12 to 13 minutes with no stops, bringing the experience to a much more palatable 6 minutes. Speaking of stops, those have become less of an issue, as beginners no longer have to worry about misloads from trying to board a fixed-grip chair.

The new quad provides faster direct access into the Strawberry zone from the base area, and also gives beginners at Snowbasin another high-speed route onto the resort’s limited green terrain. The base of Becker has been moved closer to its lower-mountain counterpart, the Wildcat Express, which has actually made loading both lifts less confusing. The lines for both lifts have always started in the same place, but now that the bottom terminals are next to each other, this actually makes sense. A slight caveat to this upgrade is that both Becker and Wildcat only access a few hundred feet of beginner terrain independently before both options merge onto the same congested trail, meaning the new lift doesn’t actually add all that much high-speed benefit for beginners. But its other benefits, along with the cumulative quality boost provided by Snowbasin’s steady trend of recent upgrades, means that we feel an increase of the resort’s lifts score from a 7 to an 8 is deserved.

Big Sky

Crowd Flow Score Change: 6 to 7

Another resort that made an upgrade to a singular, very old lift this season was Montana’s Big Sky. But unlike at Snowbasin, Big Sky’s new lift represents a much more transformative change to the resort’s circulation. The Explorer lift, a fixed-grip double on the edge of the resort’s main Mountain Village base, was removed and replaced by a 10-passenger gondola of the same name. But while the gondola begins from the same place as the old double, it goes twice as high up the mountain, ending next to the base of the Powder Seeker lift and the iconic Lone Peak tram. This has finally created a genuinely useful alternative out-of-base option for skiers and riders looking to head directly to that popular upper-mountain terrain, which was previously only possible via the Swift Current chair or an array of slow, undesirable chairlifts that went very out of the way.

Lines at Swift Current, which had been a major issue for years, have been somewhat mitigated by the new Explorer Gondola even in just its first season. That said, the gondola’s loading area sits far enough away from the main Ramcharger and Swift Current base zone that many guests still didn’t seem to realize it was a viable part of the lift network this winter. As awareness grows, we expect the crowds between Swift Current and Explorer to even out somewhat, but if one thing is clear, the new gondola’s addition has certainly helped spread out Big Sky’s out-of-base crowds more manageably than before. The gondola also has a mid-station located at the same place as the top of the old double chairlift, allowing the Explorer beginner pod to still be easily lappable. While Big Sky’s lift network was already competitive enough that the new gondola doesn’t really move the needle on the lifts score, the out-of-base crowds have been spread much more manageably by its installation, and we’ve pushed Big Sky’s crowd flow score from a 6 to a 7.

Gore

Resiliency Score Change: 5 to 6

Over in New York State, Gore Mountain made an extremely welcome change. The North Creek Ski Bowl side, which was the first section of the resort to originally open way back in 1934, had operated on a limited schedule since its connection to the broader Gore footprint in the late 2000s. This meant that Gore was only 100% open on weekends, even if conditions were ideal. But for the 2025-26 season, bolstered by the addition of a brand-new lodge and a new high-speed quad the year prior, the North Creek Ski Bowl shifted to full 7-days-a-week operations. This resulted in a substantial increase in terrain availability for Gore visitors on weekdays, and we’re raising the mountain’s resiliency score from a 5 to a 6. And while the subtle capacity increase isn’t necessarily enough to raise the resort’s lift score on its own, it’s also worth a mention that Gore also replaced its Topridge triple chair with a new fixed-grip quad.

Sunlight

Lifts Score Change: 2 to 3

Back out west in Colorado, the small Sunlight ski resort made two separate lift upgrades that represent a step forward for the ski area. The Primo and Segundo lifts, which together serve the vast majority of the terrain footprint, were upgraded from fixed-grip doubles to a quad and triple respectively for 2025-26. While neither replacement is high-speed, they add significantly more carrying capacity to the mountain’s lift network. The upgrades also secure some reliability for Sunlight, since both the outgoing doubles were over 50 years old. All in all, this is enough for us to raise the mountain’s lifts score from a 2 to a 3.

Monarch

Size Score Change: 4 to 5

The new Sunlight lifts weren’t the biggest upgrade in the state of Colorado, however. The state’s relatively low-key Monarch Mountain built a massive expansion for the 2025-2026 season. The new No Name Bowl added nearly 400 acres to Monarch’s footprint, served by a brand new triple chair and mostly made up of intermediate terrain and advanced-level glades. This is absolutely a game-changing addition for Monarch, and we’re raising the mountain’s size score from a 4 to a 5. However, the poor conditions in Colorado this season make it difficult to determine whether No Name Bowl will affect any other categories for now.

Castle Mountain

Lifts Score Change: 2 to 4; Crowd Flow Score Change: 6 to 7

Size Score Change: 7 to 6

But outside of Deer Valley, the North American ski resort that underwent perhaps the biggest transformation this season was actually Castle Mountain, a relatively under-the-radar resort in the Canadian province of Alberta. For the 2025-26 season, Castle added its first ever high-speed lift in the Stagecoach Express, which services a substantial area of terrain on the Mount Haig side of the resort that was formerly only accessible via snowcat. The new terrain is a high alpine bowl that descends into some excellent advanced glades, though there are also a couple of intermediate trails and even one beginner trail in the area. The Stagecoach Express itself is relocated from Banff Sunshine Village, meaning it isn’t exactly a brand new detachable, but the substantial refurbishments it received means it still represents a huge modernization for Castle overall. The terrain expansion has also spread crowds across the footprint more comfortably. Therefore, we’re raising Castle’s lift score 2 points, from a 2 to a 4, and raising the crowd flow score from a 6 to a 7. We also took some acreage re-calculations now that we have a better measurement of which former cat-skiing terrain is truly in bounds, which does slightly drop its measured skiable acreage from 1,800 to 1,645 acres, and therefore, Castle’s size score has gone from a 7 to a 6.

Upgrades That Didn’t Result in Score Adjustments

Now let’s go through some of the upgrades this season that, while worth touching on, didn’t actually alter our mountain scores for those resorts for various reasons.

Lake Louise

The most notable of these is probably the Richardson’s Ridge expansion at Canada’s Lake Louise. At a first glance, Richardson’s Ridge looked like it could be very promising for this Banff-area resort. It added 200 acres of terrain beyond the resort’s backside for beginners and intermediates, with both tree-cut trails and glades, all served by a fast and convenient high-speed quad. Additionally, Lake Louise was able to open the area vastly ahead of schedule on December 17, 2025 after originally shooting for a spring 2026 opening.

However, while Richardson’s Ridge definitely fills out a resort that was already extremely competitive in most of our mountain score metrics, it doesn’t really push any one category up to the next highest number. The 200-acre addition doesn’t quite reach our threshold for a size score increase, especially given that Lake Louise was already one of the largest ski resorts on the continent before the expansion. We’d argue the same is true for terrain diversity; the new footprint adds a handful of welcome intermediate cruisers and lower-level glade terrain, but it’s not really enough to truly transform the experience for blue-level skiers and riders versus previous seasons. And while the expansion was advertised as being ideal for beginners, the only ways for lower-level skiers to reach it are via two long, flat access trails that have drawn complaints in previous years.

The new terrain pod has also made crowd flow on Lake Louise’s backside a bit more strained, as everything from both Richardson’s Ridge itself and the beginner trails that access it, funnels down into the Pika runout, which is the only way for beginners to return to the resort base. Lake Louise certainly seems aware of this, having put up signs designating the Pika trail as a “high traffic” area. And while the Richardson’s Ridge Express itself is enjoyable, Lake Louise’s already-high lifts score would likely require improvements elsewhere on the backside, such as Paradise or Ptarmigan, to move any higher at this point. Overall, Richardson’s Ridge is a welcome addition to what was already one of the best ski resorts in North America, but it doesn’t have a drastic enough effect on the overall mountain experience to justify any score changes.

Park City

Meanwhile, back in Utah, the massive Park City made a significant investment for the 2025-26 season in the form of the 10-passenger Sunrise Gondola. Similarly to the Explorer Gondola at Big Sky, Sunrise replaced a fixed-grip double chair of the same name and extends well beyond that old lift’s vertical rise. The gondola starts at the main base on the Canyons side of the mountain and climbs up to the mid-mountain Red Pine Lodge, and it’s intended to give skiers and riders on the Canyons side another out-of-base option alongside the Red Pine Gondola and Orange Bubble Express.

However, the issue is that the Sunrise Gondola bottom terminal is much further from the center of the base area than those other two lifts, starting far over to the looker’s left by the Hyatt at Canyons Village. And the walk there is not especially intuitive either; you have to make your way through a not-so-obvious set of village buildings before reaching the base terminal. This means while the Sunrise Gondola has provided some crowd relief for in-the-know guests, it hasn’t done so as much as it might appear on paper, largely because many Park City guests still don’t seem to know where to find it compared to the more obvious nearby lifts. If you can figure out how to get there, Sunrise can probably be relied upon to have a much shorter wait at the beginning of the day if you’re willing to walk over. But it hasn’t done enough on a larger scale to result in an improvement for Park City’s lifts or crowd flow scores.

Minor Upgrades

There were also over a dozen minor upgrades to lifts and other improvements across North America worth a mention. In addition to the upgrades at Gore and Sunlight that we covered earlier, several other resorts replaced fixed-grip lifts merely with new fixed-grip lifts. New Mexico’s Taos and New York’s Whiteface both made direct life cycle upgrades. Taos replaced a triple with a triple, and Whiteface built a new fixed-grip double with a midstation, to replace two old doubles that ran parallel to one another. Two resorts in Washington state – White Pass and Alpental – improved a little more substantially, each replacing a fixed-grip lift with another fixed-grip lift of a higher capacity and chair size. The same could be said for the Chair 7 upgrade at Colorado’s Loveland, going from a double to a “triple” (the lift uses quad chairs, but only loads them to a maximum capacity of 3 to make space for beginners). None of these new lifts are necessarily much faster than what they replaced, but they do provide small improvements in capacity, comfort, and ease of maintenance for these mountains.

A few other resorts made direct life cycle upgrades for detachable lifts. Crystal Mountain in Washington and Bretton Woods in New Hampshire both replaced high-speed quads with new high-speed quads, essentially in the same alignment. And in Utah, Alta entirely rebuilt and realigned its Supreme high-speed quad to remove the troublesome bend in the middle. 

Aside from lifts, there are also a couple of substantial new dining options across North American ski resorts that are worth a mention. These include the Nest at Snowbird and Charlie’s Alpine Bistro at Lutsen. All of these lift and dining upgrades are welcome at their respective mountains and definitely improve the experience in their own way, though not enough for a score change.

Killington & Snowmass

Two different resorts, Vermont’s Killington and Colorado’s Snowmass, each rolled out a combination of minor improvements for the 2025-26 season. Killington made a detachable lift change with an actual capacity upgrade, replacing the 38-year-old Superstar quad with a six-pack. The resort also replaced all the cabins on the Skyeship gondola and added a new dining option called the Ledgewood Yurt. However, the yurt is a little too niche and high-end to make a true experience impact for most guests. At Snowmass, two different lifts received direct upgrades, with the Elk Camp high-speed quad becoming a six-pack, and the Cirque platter becoming a t-bar. The resort also expanded its Elk Camp restaurant by 120 seats, improving the on-mountain dining experience.

At a first glance, all these changes at Killington and Snowmass look significant enough to affect their scores. However, these two resorts are already so competitive and top-of-the-line for their respective regions that their scores in the relevant categories are already extremely good, and remain appropriate for the experience on offer. When the lifts and facilities setups are as already filled-out as they are at Killington and Snowmass, a few minor enhancements don’t necessarily move the needle as much as they would at more barebones resorts. So in the end, what we can say is that it’s nice to see our top resorts in Vermont and Colorado respectively, continuing to finetune their experiences to make them that much better for guests. 

Angel Fire

Finally, there’s New Mexico’s Angel Fire, which received a new fixed-grip lift, as well as some new trails developed on a part of the footprint that already existed. However, due to the extremely poor conditions in the Southwest, we don’t feel that we’d be able to judge this upgrade fairly just yet. So, much like the Monarch expansion, we’ll be holding off on re-appraising Angel Fire for now.

Other Score Adjustments

Lastly, let’s go through a few score changes we’re making for this season, not due to any particular changes or upgrades made by the ski resorts, but simply because we gained more information or data, and felt it necessary to adjust accordingly.

Loon & Attitash

Mountain Aesthetic Score Change: 3 to 4 each

In the positive direction, we’re upping the mountain aesthetic scores of two New Hampshire resorts, Loon and Attitash. We originally docked points from Attitash for feeling a bit ordinary, while Loon suffers from a commercialized feel. Additionally, both resorts have some excessive on-mountain buildup, and it’s historically been difficult to find any isolation from the crowds at either one. However, we feel that we didn’t give Loon and Attitash enough credit for their natural beauty, particularly in upper-mountain areas. Both footprints sit on mountainsides that are quite prominent, allowing for some solid views higher up, including of the iconic Mount Washington. As a result, we’re upping both resorts’ mountain aesthetic scores from a 3 to a 4 each.

Snowbasin & Park City

Resiliency Score Change: 8 to 7 each

Our other score adjustments of this nature come in the state of Utah. We already touched on the reduction of Deer Valley’s resiliency score from an 8 to a 6 due to the new expansion terrain. However, the other two major Utah resorts outside the Cottonwoods—Snowbasin and Park City—have also exhibited serious vulnerabilities. Both footprints bottom out at low elevations compared to the Cottonwoods resorts, let alone nearly all major Colorado destinations, and while this was exposed in a drastic way by this winter’s fickle weather, it has also been a noticeable problem over multiple previous seasons as well.

At Park City, terrain openings have become significantly slower at the start of seasons, and abrupt terrain closures and poorly maintained trails in the middle of seasons have not been uncommon either. Snowbasin’s Strawberry zone has seen increasingly variable openings as well, despite the new lift installed there a couple of years back. We’re not judging Snowbasin and Park City off of just this season, in which every single resort in the West struggled with resiliency to some degree. But when you look at how well the four mountains in the Cottonwoods managed to hold up in 25-26, having something close to normal operations – it’s clear that there’s a more significant gap in Utah between the two sets of resorts than we previously illustrated. Snowbasin and Park City simply have a few too many consistent resiliency issues compared to their Cottonwoods counterparts, as well as many of the similarly scaled mountains in nearby Colorado. As a result, we are lowering the resiliency scores of both from an 8 to a 7. 

Implications For Our Rankings

So what does this all mean for the North American ski scene as a whole? Well, there are some notable shifts from these changes. The biggest winner is Castle Mountain, which moves up from 59th place in 2025 to 55th in 2026. Other notable climbers in the rankings include Monarch, Gore, Loon, and Attitash. On the other hand, Park City sees the biggest year-over-year decline, dropping from 32nd to 37th in North America. And despite all its changes, Deer Valley retains the same ranking—22nd in North America—as it did last year.

And then, we have some notable shifts at the top of our rankings. And that includes a new entry into our top 10: Big Sky. The resort jumps two spaces from 12th to 10th, knocking Snowbasin back to 11th despite the improvements there, and putting Beaver Creek in 12th. 

The rest of the top 10 list will look familiar for those who followed along last year. In 9th place, we have Telluride, while Lake Louise, which has seen that huge suite of investments in recent years, retains an impressive 8th place finish. Vail takes 7th place, while Snowmass remains the best ski resort in Colorado at #6 in North America. In 5th place, we have Banff Sunshine Village, while Snowbird and Alta take 4th and 3rd, respectively, bolstered by the minor improvements at both of those resorts. In second place for the second year in a row, we have Jackson Hole, which has greatly benefitted from an array of infrastructure upgrades in recent seasons and hasn’t had anyone move to overtake it yet. But Jackson Hole still loses out 1st place to our long-running champion, Whistler Blackcomb, which is so big, diverse, and effective infrastructure-wise that it’s nearly impossible to match.

But like with last year, the Mountain Score gap between Whistler and Jackson Hole is now just a single point. If Whistler slips up in any way, or its crowding and reliability problems get worse, we could finally have a new top peak next winter.

Background

The 2026-27 season will be the last one for Powder Mountain’s Sunrise Poma. In a recent operations update, the resort announced that the surface lift will be removed in the summer of 2027, and the terrain it serves will become hike-in only starting in 2027-28. Powder’s stated reason is that Sunrise sits inside the residential development footprint, and removing it is necessary to support the neighborhood growth that helps subsidize ski operations. The resort framed the change as part of its broader model of staying independent and publicly accessible by leaning on the real estate that surrounds it.

The same update pointed to other work aimed at the public side of the mountain. DMI is opening this winter with more than 1,000 acres of largely untouched terrain. The old Sundown lift has been removed and will be replaced by a high-speed quad. And the resort is spending over $1 million on 16.9 miles of new public trails this summer.

Our Take

The Sunrise platter was historically the most direct way to get from the Hidden Lake Lodge area into multiple areas including Cobabe Canyon, Sanctuary, Sunrise, and Mushroom Valley. When the Village and Mary’s lifts became homeowner-only, it then became the only public lift providing access to that entire area. And given that it’s a surface lift rather than a chairlift, its inherently low capacity caused notable lines at Sunrise once those other areas were reserved for homeowners.

Rather than upgrading to something more appropriate for the demand it was now carrying, it looks like Powder Mountain is choosing to remove lift service to this terrain entirely, at least for the general public. Homeowners can still access it via the more indirect route of taking Village and Mary’s. Even from Mary’s, the runs starting at the top of Sunrise will be hike-to only even for homeowners.  These runs include Dr C’s and Claire’s.

Now, this does go against some positive changes on the public-facing side of the resort. A new chairlift in the DMI area is expected to open a substantial amount of new lift-served terrain for the first time ever, and the Sundown chairlift is being upgraded to a high-speed quad, which should make that beginner-oriented terrain zone more enjoyable to spend time at. That’s also the only place at the resort with night skiing. But making more of the original footprint less accessible to the public in favor of private homeowners is sure to leave a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

It’s unclear how many people will want to do that hike once the lift is removed in 2027. The area is quite expansive, and the terrain will likely see less traffic without lift service. But not too many people are likely to want to hike in for what is ultimately still fairly mellow beginner and intermediate terrain, especially given that homeowners can still access it via Village and Mary’s, so it won’t be untouched. Because the terrain from the top of Sunrise is so large, there has always been a hardy contingent of non-homeowners who were willing to make the hike at times when this terrain was open and Sunrise not running, if for no other reason than to ski less crowded runs.

Background

Even with all the new ski resort developments in the twenty-first century, few have been as monumental as the Deer Valley East Village expansion.

The project nearly triples the resort’s terrain, making Deer Valley the third largest ski resort in the United States by skiable acreage. But as was on full display this season, there are fundamental resiliency issues with this new terrain. The low elevation and unfavorable aspect makes the expansion so reliant on artificial snow, that it calls into question how it got green-lit at all.

So how did such a mind-bogglingly expensive project actually get approval, not just from Deer Valley’s leadership, but from every entity involved? As we dug into this story, we found several layers of uncomfortable truths, involving real estate moguls, local government coercion, and even the military. And in this piece, we’ll tell the story of how perhaps the most controversial ski resort project of the 21st century got off the ground, along with the incentive structures behind it, the real risks attached to this terrain, and the people who are affected most.

Origin of the Deer Valley Expansion

So first of all, where did the idea to expand Deer Valley’s terrain onto this land, which is mostly located on a parcel known as Mayflower, even come from? Well, development rights for the land date back to the 1980s, only a few years after Deer Valley itself opened as a ski resort. Then, in 2013, representatives from Deer Valley and land owners for Mayflower engaged in initial discussions on expanding the ski terrain and adding new real estate development (there was most likely very specific reasoning for this 2013 timing, as we’ll get into later). However, for reasons that never became public, these talks failed to go beyond the idea phase, and the idea for expansion was tabled.

A year later in 2014, things took a turn when the Mayflower parcel officially hit the market. The 4,000-acre land—and its substantial development rights—had been held since the early 1980s by a Netherlands-based ownership group. But it seemed like this group no longer wanted to play a part in that development. For over three years, this massive parcel remained unsold.

But then in 2017, Mayflower finally found its new owners: the New York City-based Extell group. In November of that year, Extell acquired more than 2,300 acres of the Mayflower land near Deer Valley, pairing it with other nearby land parcels it had been quietly buying since 2014. But unlike its owners for the past four decades, Extell had serious intentions for the Mayflower land. The company immediately framed the combined holdings as the basis for the resort village, new ski slopes, and major real estate development opportunities that had been disregarded for decades.

So who exactly was Extell, and why were they so interested in such an ambitious project? Extell Development Company, founded and run by Gary Barnett, is by any measure, one of the most aggressive real estate operators in New York City. Their specialty is assembling complex land deals—patiently buying up parcels and acquiring coveted air rights, and using creative financing structures to build the tallest, most expensive residential towers money can buy. The original One57 tower was, at the time of its conception, a wildly speculative bet that the Manhattan ultra-luxury market could absorb $90 million-plus penthouses. Barnett’s crown jewel, Central Park Tower, is the tallest purely residential building in the world at 1,550 feet. It cost $3 billion to build and was originally projected to sell out at $4 billion.

The Mayflower acquisition fits the same pattern, just transposed onto a mountain instead of a city block. Five years of buying parcels through BLX LLC, their affiliated investment entity. Twenty-six separate transactions, inclusive of the Mayflower terrain itself. Nearly 7,000 acres ultimately assembled.

MIDA: The Financing Vehicle That Made Everything Possible

But perhaps the biggest piece to Extell’s puzzle was the creative financing. As Gary Barnett himself acknowledged, there was one public financing entity that made the entire project feasible: the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, originally created by Utah’s legislature in 2007 as a way to work with private companies to economically sustain military lands. So if this land was supposedly being developed for a ski resort, how was Extell able to qualify for MIDA?

Well, there is a nominal military justification. Back in the 1990s, the Air Force used to have a very small MWR (short for Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) ski lodge near Snowbasin. The lodge was special in that it offered the opportunity for military members to stay by the ski slopes for significantly discounted rates. However, this lodge was closed in the late 1990s to make way for the 2002 Olympic downhill course, and no immediate replacement came about.

In 2001, Congress passed legislation granting the Air Force a 26-acre parcel in Park City as a replacement site, with the requirement that it partner with a private or governmental entity for construction (Congress appropriated no money for the project itself). When Utah created MIDA in 2007, it inherited this unresolved replacement project. 

Then, in 2009, Utah state code was amended to allow MIDA project areas to be created on private land outside of military ownership, provided the property owner and the local government consented. This meant that almost any private development could attach itself to some military-related purpose in order to become eligible for MIDA financing. The 26-acre parcel in Park City provided by Congress, which had now received years of pushback from local residents, was thus abandoned in favor of a privately-owned 40-acre parcel in Wasatch County along US-40.

In 2011, the consent needed from the local government was received. Wasatch County agreed to the creation of the Military Recreation Facility project area, initially covering just that modest footprint of around 40 acres. However, once the county had made that agreement, it found itself with less effective control than it had anticipated. Direct language from County Administrator Mike Davis implies that after agreeing to the initial project area, the state effectively pushed Wasatch County into accepting MIDA as the land-use authority west of US-40, and forcing their hand into accepting future expansion amendments. So technically, the county did provide their consent every step of the way, but the structural dynamics made meaningful resistance difficult. And through the process of at least eight formal amendments to the Project Area Plan, what initially looked like a series of small asks eventually expanded to cover roughly eight square miles or over 5,000 acres, wrapping around the Jordanelle Reservoir from Mayflower all the way north to SR-248 at Hideout. 

And crucially, MIDA itself certified that the project met the legal requirements—which were remarkably low. Under Utah Code §63H-1-401, a MIDA project area must include at least some qualifying military land, but the rest of the project area may include public or private land whether or not it is contiguous to that military land, just as long as the relevant municipality and the landowner consent. There is no minimum percentage of the project that must serve military personnel, nor is there any state or federal agency sign-off on whether the military nexus is genuine or substantial. In the Mayflower project’s case, the legal military hook was the military land component at East Village itself, where MIDA’s project includes the MWR hotel site at the Grand Hyatt. And that’s how the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley’s 100 military-rate rooms, which constitute about 26% of one hotel within the entire development, became the legal hook that justifies including thousands of acres of private Extell land within the project area.

So why was MIDA such a coveted financing tool for Extell—and really the only way to make this project financially feasible?

The answer is public bond and tax increment financing. MIDA has now issued a staggering $650 million in bonds across two authorizations—$260 million in 2021 and $390 million in 2024—to finance roads, parking lots, and lifts, among other things. And to pay it back, MIDA keeps 75% of the incremental property tax revenue generated within the project zone for 40 years. That’s not a typo—four decades. Recent legislation also allows MIDA to collect up to a 15% resort tax on lodging within its zones and levy an additional 0.5% sales tax. The remaining 25% of incremental tax revenue trickles down to local entities like the Wasatch County School District.

In practical terms, this means that as billions of dollars of luxury real estate backed by one of New York City’s wealthiest private developers gets built, the vast majority of the property tax revenue that would normally fund local schools, fire departments, and roads is instead being redirected to pay off MIDA bonds that are, in turn, financing the infrastructure that makes the luxury real estate possible in the first place. And yes, it’s effectively just a block of discounted hotel rooms, along with a military concierge on-site, that is sufficient to unlock all of this.

Extell Gets Alterra On Board

So it was clear that Extell now had access to a public financing structure that no other ski resort developer in modern history has had access to. However, around the same time Extell was assembling the Mayflower parcel, another potential wrinkle came up.

In 2017, the same year Extell closed on the Mayflower acquisition, Deer Valley entered new ownership. The new parent company was a newly formed joint venture between KSL Capital Partners and Henry Crown and Company—the same partnership that had just acquired Intrawest’s 11 resorts and Mammoth Resorts. By early 2018, this entity had a name: Alterra Mountain Company. Suddenly, Deer Valley had gone from an independently operated luxury ski resort to a flagship property in a national portfolio, competing directly with Vail Resorts for the future of the destination ski industry.

This changed everything for the Mayflower project. Yes, Deer Valley and Extell had held some preliminary discussions as early as 2017, according to reports. But after Alterra took control, these talks seemed to slow down. And as the months turned into years with no deal, something notable started to happen: Extell’s public messaging shifted, and Mayflower began positioning itself as a fully independent ski resort.

By 2019 and into the early 2020s, the company began emphasizing that Mayflower had enough acreage to operate as a standalone destination, with 4,300 skiable acres, 3,200 feet of vertical, and up to 15 planned ski lifts. Extell representatives told reporters that Mayflower would be an equally world-class resort to its neighbors. A 199-year land lease Extell signed with Deer Valley in 2019, which covered a small sliver of land Deer Valley was already using in its Jordanelle area, was carefully structured to not include an operating agreement.

But there was a critical complication to Extell’s new marketing plans. In New York City, Extell’s projects sit among one of the most established metro areas in the world. The location itself sells the real estate. In Utah, Extell was attempting to build luxury condos at the base of a ski resort that didn’t exist yet. Without Deer Valley’s name attached, one could argue that real estate strategy started to have serious problems.

On top of that, if Mayflower had truly decided to staff up an entirely new ski operations division, the structural challenges were brutal. Their team had no experience running ski patrol, managing snowmaking systems, training ski instructors, or securing the construction and/or operation of ski lifts. And despite their local leadership having no mechanism to stop the project, there was also the issue of Wasatch County leaders originally approving the project as a Deer Valley expansion and expressing some public concerns about Mayflower developing independently. So while operating Mayflower as a fully independent resort may have been a useful negotiating position for Extell—and one they seemed very committed to on the surface, with the company hiring trail designers, clearing runs, and engaging in initial conversations with lift manufacturers—their true plan was almost certainly to win Alterra over.

And in the end, after five years of slow-motion negotiations, that’s exactly what happened. Extell had secured perhaps the greatest public financing deals for developing terrain of this magnitude in the industry’s modern history, providing an unprecedentedly favorable cost basis for such a monumental endeavor. And in the final deal, Alterra was able to invest in mountain infrastructure, like lifts and snowmaking, without having to put any speculative capital into real estate, which wasn’t as much of an area of expertise. It’s also worth noting that without the Mayflower deal, Alterra would potentially watch a major competitor materialize 15 minutes from its flagship property, with the same target customer and a brand-new development advantage that Deer Valley couldn’t match.

In August 2023, the official announcement came. Deer Valley would operate Mayflower’s ski terrain, and the entire expansion would be rebranded as “Deer Valley East Village.” The combined resort would close to triple in size to 5,726 acres—larger than Vail, larger than Whistler Blackcomb’s individual mountains, and turning Deer Valley, of all places, into the third-largest ski resort in the United States. It was simply and truly the largest single ski resort expansion in North American history.

Is The New Terrain Any Good?

At this point, we can reasonably conclude that this land was chosen primarily because of the MIDA incentives and the developer partnership, not the actual quality of the terrain. So what does that all mean for the skiing itself? With nearly three-quarters of the expansion already built out, we feel it’s fair to make an initial assessment.

On the plus side, there is a significant amount of new terrain in Deer Valley’s footprint, and the scale alone is hard to understate. This includes the first true 3,000-foot continuous vertical descent at Deer Valley, despite the fact that the resort had advertised a 3,000-foot vertical drop for years—a figure that was technically accurate from peak to base but never achievable in a single uninterrupted run until now. The lifts are mostly excellent and largely high-speed, with the flagship installations being heated bubble chairs and a two-stage, 10-passenger gondola connecting the East Village base to Park Peak. As a pure infrastructure achievement, it’s incredibly impressive. Some of the higher elevation meadows included with the expansion, most notably those served by the Pinyon Express, introduce some excellent beginner terrain and low-angle glade runs.

But if it weren’t for the almost comically favorable MIDA tax and bond structure, and the real estate incentives on Extell’s part, it’s hard to see any developer focused specifically on finding the highest quality ski terrain choosing to develop here. On the whole, the terrain is somewhat plain; it’s mainly beginner and intermediate trails with not much in the way of challenge. Small sections of advanced terrain do exist, but they’re not particularly extraordinary in the grand scheme of things.

But perhaps much more importantly, there are serious snow resiliency issues. Most of the trails face unfavorable aspects for snow preservation, with a large portion of them facing east, creating serious sun bake. This is compounded by the low elevation of the new terrain; the new base village bottoms out at 6,350 feet—low for Utah, and well below the threshold that climate experts say will become increasingly problematic in coming decades.

Deer Valley has invested heavily in snowmaking infrastructure to try to address this, with 1,200 snow guns, 80 miles of pipe, four pump houses, and a 10-million-gallon snowmaking pond. But the numbers reveal a structural problem. Extell’s acquisition of the Mayflower land came with water rights from the Jordanelle Reservoir totaling 900 acre-feet per year, or about an 125% addition to Deer Valley’s original water rights. But when it’s fully completed, the expansion terrain will increase Deer Valley’s total size by 183%, from 2,026 to 5,726 acres. Since the water rights grew by nearly a third less than than the terrain itself, this means significantly fewer snowmaking water rights per acre on the new terrain that has worse exposure and lower elevation than the rest of the resort.

Those factors were arguably on full display this past season, which, to be fair, was the lowest snowfall year in Utah history. Two of the expansion’s lifts, Pioche Express and Neptune Express, alongside the terrain they served, never opened at all. But it also confirmed what locals had worried about for years: that in a bad snow year, this low-elevation, poor-aspect multi-million-dollar expansion funded in large part by taxpayers would simply sit bare.

One final note on the terrain worth mentioning: as has been Deer Valley’s policy since its creation, snowboarders are entirely banned from the new expansion terrain. This raises eyebrows in the context of MIDA’s military justification. Industry data suggests roughly one in three winter resort visitors is a snowboarder, and there’s no particular reason to think the military population skews differently. If the Grand Hyatt’s 100 discounted rooms are genuinely intended to serve military recreation, what does banning roughly a third of that potential user base from the terrain those rooms are built to access say about military well-being?

Who Really Bears The Risk?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable part of all this development, despite the issues it brings, is that the financial risk is distributed in a way that heavily favors the developer.

Extell isn’t without risk. They still need to sell units, and as it turns out, they have run into demand generation issues before, especially in Manhattan’s supertall market. Central Park Tower has been an enormously difficult sell. Units have moved at an average discount of roughly 25% from offering-plan prices, with some full-floor units selling at 35-42% below their original ask.

But the structure of Extell’s deals creates meaningful risk insulation. Development and management fees are earned during construction itself. Pre-sales fund the build—60% of the Four Seasons hotel residences were reportedly sold before the building was finished. Construction loans are secured against the property instead of Extell’s personal balance sheet. And critically, MIDA’s $650 million in bonds paid for the roads, parking, and infrastructure that would normally sit on the developer’s books. Extell can have a project underperform significantly and still survive.

Alterra, meanwhile, is in a more complicated position than it might appear. They don’t own the land or the real estate, and the MIDA bonds have helped pay for lifts and snowmaking. But there’s a second risk that’s harder to quantify: brand reputation. Deer Valley has spent four decades cultivating the country’s premier luxury ski identity. Despite continuing to excel hospitality-wise, when a meaningful chunk of the mountain sits bare for an entire season, that brand takes a hit.

In March 2026, just weeks before the end of one of Alterra’s most challenging operational seasons, CEO Jared Smith announced he would step down with no public reason given. Was Mayflower the cause? Almost certainly not entirely. But executing the largest single-season ski resort expansion in North American history through the lowest-snowfall winter in Utah history—with visible bare terrain anyone driving US-40 could see—is the kind of thing that creates pressure at the top of an organization whose owners’ patience with operational stumbles is finite.

But perhaps the party that got the shortest end of the stick risk-wise is the local population. The public bears the infrastructure risk through MIDA’s $650 million in bonds. If the development doesn’t generate the tax revenue projected, if luxury ski real estate demand softens (as it did in Manhattan’s supertall market), and if climate change continues to hammer snowfall at lower elevations—the bonds still need to be serviced. The 40-year tax diversion means that for the better part of half a century, Wasatch County will be receiving a fraction of the property tax revenue that this massive development would otherwise generate for schools, roads, and emergency services, among other things.

The environmental and community risk is borne by the Wasatch Back’s existing residents and ecosystems. Nearly 6,200 residential units in the Jordanelle Basin will and already have fundamentally transformed the character of the area, straining water resources, increasing traffic on US-40, and altering wildlife corridors. The 2034 Winter Olympics will bring additional development pressure. And the workforce housing crisis will only intensify as thousands of new hospitality and service positions compete for an already-strained labor pool.

Let’s revisit the demand question one last time. The development and its associated footprint impacts are coming regardless, but is there really enough demand for luxury ski real estate at this scale, in this specific location? The East Village base likely receives less than 150 inches of snow annually—well below what destination skiers expect from Utah’s vaunted “Greatest Snow on Earth” brand. The resort’s ban on snowboarding, while popular with its existing clientele, excludes a third of the winter sports market and potential demand as a result. And the broader luxury real estate market is not immune to economic cycles—just ask anyone trying to sell a $50 million condo at Central Park Tower at a 42% discount.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the truth about the Deer Valley East Village expansion: it might work out spectacularly for everyone involved. The skiing could be very popular among Deer Valley’s clientele. The hotels look very promising from a hospitality standpoint. The real estate could sell. And the Wasatch Back could benefit from the economic activity.

But step back and look at what we actually have here: a luxury ski resort expansion built on terrain chosen for its real estate appeal rather than its skiing. An expansion that only became financially feasible through the contortion of a state authority originally created to serve military land—quietly stretched from 40 acres to eight square miles with no independent oversight and no one required to seriously question whether any of it made sense. This project could flop, and if it does, nobody escapes clean—not Extell and not Alterra, and especially not the Wasatch County taxpayers who will spend four decades watching tax revenue flow into bond payments for a resort that never reached critical mass.

The deepest irony is that this outcome was entirely preventable: had MIDA remained what it was actually created to be, with real guardrails and genuine independent oversight, someone would have had to defend this project on its merits—the terrain, the snowfall, the workforce, the demand—before a single bond was issued. Instead, a self-certifying, self-expanding authority made all of those questions optional, and now everyone is along for the ride whether they want to be or not.

One of the longest-running lift installation battles in American history seems to finally be coming to an end. Last week, Park City finally received approval from the Park City Planning Commission to move forward with two key lift upgrades: replacing the Silverlode six-person lift with a new eight-pack lift, with the goal of relieving mid-mountain lift lines, and replacing both the Eagle and Eaglet triple chairs with a single two-stage Eagle six-pack, providing a new high-speed lift route from Park City’s base. These installations have been planned since 2021, but Park City was forced to cancel their original replacements in 2022 after the Park City Planning Commission blocked them at the time.

A new timeline for the lifts has not been determined yet.

Our Take

While no new timeline has been announced, it is a relief to see these projects finally cleared for installation. These lifts were designed to address problems at Park City that already existed five years ago, and they haven’t gotten any better since.

The Silverlode lift is one of the worst chokepoints at Park City, providing the only convenient access to upper-mountain Park City-side areas for Quicksilver gondola riders coming from the Canyons side. We imagine this capacity upgrade from a six to an eight-seater will go a way towards reducing lines. That said, we would go as far as to say an entirely new helper lift may be warranted to fully fix the situation.

The proposed Eagle six-pack, which replaces an existing triple chair, will provide a third high-speed lift route out from the Park City base. The upgrade should offer a more direct, desirable link to the King Con area, which we expect will pull crowds off the other two major lifts providing service out of the base village. In addition, the installation will finally restore direct lift service to the Eaglet pod, as that lift had already been decommissioned in 2021 in advance of the new lift’s installation.

Ultimately, we are looking forward to finally checking out these upgrades when they debut, almost certainly before the 2034 Olympics but likely well before then.

Considering a trip to Park City? Check out our comprehensive mountain review, along with our full Utah and Rockies rankings.

#9 in California

#79 Overall

WRITTEN REVIEW

MOUNTAIN STATS

VIDEO REVIEW

CATEGORY BREAKDOWN 

See our criteria

Snow:

Resiliency:

Size:

Terrain Diversity:

Challenge:

Lifts:

Crowd Flow:

Facilities:

Navigation:

Mountain Aesthetic:

GOOD TO KNOW

1-Day Ticket: $119-$169

Pass Affiliation: Ikon Pass

On-site Lodging: No

Après-Ski: Limited

Nearest Cities: Mammoth Lakes (30 mins), Reno (2.5 hrs), Los Angeles (6 hrs)

Recommended Ability Level:

  +   Pros

• Beautiful footprint

• Low-traffic mid- and upper-mountain trails

• Free tickets for kids 12 and under

  –   Cons

• Woefully outdated out-of-base lift setup

• Awkward mountain layout

• Limited true beginner terrain

MOUNTAIN STATS

Skiable Footprint: 925 acres

Total Footprint: 1,500 acres

Lift-Serviced Terrain: 100%

Top Elevation: 10,135 ft

Vertical Drop: 2,561 ft

Lifts: 6

Trails: 41

Beginner: 15%

Intermediate: 40%

Advanced/Expert: 45%

VIDEO

Mountain Review

When it comes to skiing and riding in California, there are few resorts that can still make the case for being off the beaten path. June Mountain might be one of the remaining exceptions. With a location about two dozen miles north of Mammoth, modest visitation, and a marketing campaign that leans heavily on family friendliness, the resort might seem like a strong alternative to the bigger destinations for your next peak-time ski trip. However, it turns out there’s a bit more to the family-friendliness story than June Mountain would have you believe. So is June the right pick for your next ski trip? Let’s jump in.

Mountain Layout and Aesthetic

With about 925 skiable acres, June’s terrain footprint as a whole is modest in size.  The footprint variety might appear pretty modest too, and none of the inbounds terrain is above treeline. That said, the views of the surrounding Eastern Sierra mountains on clear days make the resort feel bigger and more dramatic than it skis.

Indeed, June’s aesthetic is one of its strongest attributes. There are beautiful views of surrounding mountains and the nearby valley from the slopes, including some views of June Lake itself from mid- and lower-mountain areas. The views include fully above-treeline peaks right in your face, which is very rare in the Sierra and gives the mountain a uniquely striking atmosphere.

Despite not being the biggest in the world, the resort is broken up into several distinct terrain pods, in large part due to a somewhat unorthodox topography.

Beginner Terrain

June Mountain has a good number of things going for it for beginners, but, for such a family-oriented mountain, there are some significant drawbacks as well. Official green terrain is relegated to the small J2 and J3 pods, which effectively function as the resort’s learning areas; all other greens are only accessible by taking a blue run first.

However, trail ratings are often on the easier side, making some of the blues accessible for skiers and riders who would otherwise stick to greens at other mountains. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the Silverado trail, which was actually marked as a green until the early 2010s. The biggest issue for beginners, however, may be that there is no beginner way down from mid-mountain to the base, which creates a more frustrating operational condition than one might expect on paper. Those who can’t ski or ride the blue trail down will need to download the J1 double chairlift to get back to their cars, which involves an awkward, sometimes scary experience given the steep ride down. Not all less-experienced guests will enjoy this, especially when most competing mountains don’t require beginners to do downloading of any kind.

Intermediate Terrain

June Mountain has solid terrain for intermediates, but like with the beginner experience, there are a few issues. The main blue pod at the resort is J6, with a good number of low-intermediate cruisers. Some shorter blues off to the skiers’ left side of J6 are more calibrated to the difficulty level at a typical resort. That said, the runs off this lift are bogged down by a lengthy flat spot in the middle of the pod, with the problem getting worse the further to the skier’s left you go. This is frustrating because J6 is the longest and one of the most convenient lift pods at the resort, although most runs can be lapped before the flat spot happens by utilizing the J4 lift (although that lift is pretty slow). The J7 lift has a handful of shorter but enjoyable intermediate cruisers as well, although to get there from J6, you do have to engage in a little bit of, you guessed it, flat terrain. The two blue trails off the J2 terrain pod also involve fairly protracted flat spots at the beginning. One notable positive of the intermediate experience is that the upper mountain is home to solid, moderately-sloped glade terrain when conditions allow.

Terrain Parks

June Mountain offers a few terrain park areas each season, typically centered around the J2 lift. Guests can expect small boxes, rails, jumps, berms, and rollers, but the entire park system is designed to be small and family-friendly, meaning you probably won’t be hucking anything crazy here.

TRAIL MAP

Advanced Terrain

Single black terrain exists only in the J1, J2, and J7 pods, with much of it groomed. Since J1 is not the most reliable and J2 only serves one black trail, J7 stands out as arguably the best part of the resort to lap for people who don’t want to spend time on mellow terrain. It is shorter than the J6 pod we covered earlier, but it offers sustained vertical with no flat spots. The majority of the single-blacks off J7 are groomed, allowing for serious speed runs, although they are still easier than blacks at many destination resorts. The ungroomed Wall trail off J2 offers a strong mogul challenge, offering a fantastic view of the mid-mountain complex and nearby June Lake, and the small amount of single-black terrain served by J1 offers a decently challenging descent back to the base when conditions allow.

Expert Terrain

Despite the fairly mellow terrain across most of June Mountain, there is a substantial step up in difficulty when moving into double-black terrain at the resort. June’s hardest marked trails are very steep and ungroomed, with even some cornice drops depending on where you look. J1 has the most sustained and largest quantity of steeps at the resort, making it a solid option if you are looking for expert terrain. However, the lower elevation means variable conditions and inconsistent openings. Some J1 double-blacks can only be accessed by riding to the top of J2 first, making them kind of hard to find but offering slightly better snow retention and more vertical than the ones directly down from the mid-mountain lodge. Like with single-black runs, J7’s expert terrain is by far the most reliable at the resort. And while the J7 double-blacks are shorter than those off J1, they offer very steep pitches and a handful of surprisingly technical sections as well.

Backcountry

June Mountain also offers surprisingly strong access to backcountry terrain, with a gate at the top of J7. That said, this terrain doesn’t filter back into the resort and is best explored with a guide and life-saving equipment like a beacon, shovel, and probe.

Snow Quality and Resiliency

Thanks to its eastern Sierra location, June Mountain typically sees decent snowfall totals each winter and a secure base in upper-mountain areas. However, the resort doesn’t benefit from as favorable accumulation totals as nearby Mammoth, which sits at a largely higher elevation and catches storms more consistently.

That said, June’s more sheltered footprint provides resilient operations during storm days, and the entire mountain will often still be operating when many of Mammoth’s lifts are on wind hold. However, conditions on June’s lower-mountain J1 pod are more variable than the rest of the mountain because of the lower elevation. The terrain here can sometimes be partially or fully unskiable, requiring guests to download the J1 chairlift to leave the resort.

Navigation

As a relatively small resort, getting truly lost at June won’t be a serious concern. But as we alluded to earlier, the bigger navigational problem comes with the resort’s awkward layout. When descending from the top back to mid-mountain, it’s hard to avoid at least some flavor of flat terrain, with the problem getting worse as you make your way further to the skiers’ left. By the time you get to the green run out from the bottom of J4, it is essentially just a catwalk. Once you get far enough left to the point that’s you’re ending up at the bottom of J7, there is no trail back to the lodge at all; instead, you have to take the slow but short J3 chair to get back. While this complaint may sound specific, it impacts nearly every part of the resort outside directly lapping some short beginner and expert-oriented terrain pods.

In general, trail signs at June are well placed with good lift and facilities markings, but there could be more trail maps placed around the resort. In addition, some signs are now slightly inaccurate, with the Rainbow Ridge trail, which was remarked as a blue a few years ago, still signed as a green on the mountain. At least the bottom of the chairlift that accesses it, J6, does have signage saying there’s no beginner terrain up there.

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Lifts and Crowd Flow

On paper, June Mountain’s lift setup isn’t the worst in the world. The upper mountain lapping pods are held down by two high-speed quads, J6 and J7, with the former serving intermediate terrain and the latter serving more advanced runs. Some other mid-mountain lifts are old and slow, but they’re short and often avoidable, albeit with some of that avoidance requiring slogging through flat terrain.

But the Achilles’ heel of June Mountain’s lift system—and one that ultimately cascades into numerous broader problems with the resort’s overall experience—is the slow, fixed-grip J1 lift providing the only access out of the main base. J1 is an ancient center-pole double chair that is over six decades old. To the resort’s credit, it is one of the only center-pole doubles out west with a safety bar, although the safety bar is an odd sideways folding contraption. But this lift is a major chokepoint. 

Even though June does not get anywhere near the traffic of Mammoth, J1’s combination of low capacity and non-existent redundancy creates significant lift lines. On peak weekends or holidays, waits at the bottom often range from 30 minutes to an hour, and in the worst-case scenario, they can even stretch to an hour or longer, with lines extending all the way out of the parking lot and into town. Lines are typically worst from around 9 to 11; if you get there early and ride when it starts spinning around 8, you can avoid the worst of it.

The situation is made worse by the mix of users funneled onto the lift. Because so many beginners ride J1, there are lots of misloads, which slows things down even more. As we mentioned earlier, J1 offers downloading from the mid-mountain—but when lower-mountain conditions aren’t ideal, all guests will need to download J1 to leave the resort, not just beginners. This creates even more delays and can often result in significant lines simply to leave the resort, most often during the beginning or end of the season. On center pole lifts, solo riders must load on the inner side, and they enforce this strictly. If you load on the outer side, they will stop the lift and make you reload.

J1 would be a much better lift if it were just for lapping expert terrain, but because it is also used by literally everyone to get up the mountain and for downloading, it becomes far less practical to take advantage of the resort’s natural steeps in this area on busy days, even if conditions are prime for it.

This all being said, other lifts basically never have lines.

It is worth noting that June’s lower-mountain lift issues didn’t always exist. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the resort operated a flagship funitel known as the QMC. It ran parallel to J1, which was at the time effectively a backup lift, but it was ultimately removed due to design flaws. Remnants of that lift still exist, including a large bridge near the mid-mountain lodge from the former top terminal, and the old lift line remains visible to the looker’s right of J1.

On-Mountain Facilities

June Mountain’s capacity issues, exacerbated by the reluctance of most of its guests to drop below mid-mountain before the end of the day, extend to its on-mountain facility setup. The mid-mountain June Meadows Chalet lodge is not big enough for the holidays, and there is often a rush to get a table, with lots of people standing up eating. Food is decidedly overpriced, although it is understandable given that people are willing to pay a premium to avoid going back down and dealing with the J1 experience again.

To give the resort some credit, there are a few alternative options open on weekends and holidays. There’s a to-go shack outside the mid-mountain lodge if you don’t want to deal with the crowds inside, and the resort does have another upper-mountain lodge near the bases of the J3 and J7 lifts called Slim’s Cantina, although it’s pretty small and short on space as well.

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Getting There and Parking

June Mountain is not particularly easy to access, and its location creates some unusual tradeoffs depending on where you’re coming from. From Los Angeles, the drive is roughly 5.5 to 6 hours in good conditions. But from Southern California, the resort is actually further north than Mammoth, meaning you have to drive past Mammoth Lakes—already a larger, more developed destination—to get there. That alone makes June a tough sell as a primary destination for most Los Angeles-based skiers and riders.

From the north, June is about 2.5 to 3 hours from Reno. While that’s closer than Mammoth, it puts June in direct competition with the Tahoe resorts, which are significantly closer, easier to reach, and generally offer larger footprints and more developed infrastructure.

The final approach into June Mountain can also be a concern. The access road is known to be sketchy and isn’t always well-plowed, which can make the last stretch of the drive more challenging in winter conditions. Ultimately, while June is not remote in an absolute sense, its location relative to stronger nearby options—and the quirks of actually getting there—make it harder to justify from a logistics standpoint.

On the plus side, parking at June is free. That said, the main base area lot is relatively limited in size, and on busier days it can fill up quickly, with no great overflow options. When that happens, some visitors may attempt to park along the road closer to June Lake, but law enforcement is strict and will ticket cars. At least the limited parking puts a hard cap on how truly bad the J1 lift lines can get.

Lodging and Après-Ski

While June Mountain doesn’t have any on-site lodging, the town of June Lake offers a small selection of hotels, motels, cabins, and vacation rentals just a few minutes from the base. However, the overall lodging selection there is limited, with the options that do exist generally being more rustic with fewer amenities.

As a result, many visitors choose to stay in Mammoth Lakes, about 25-30 minutes south, where there is a much wider range of lodging and much more to do.

Speaking of things to do, the town of June Lake isn’t all that strong for après either. Those looking for nightlife will once again be better off basing themselves in Mammoth Lakes.

Verdict

June Mountain’s unusual circumstances get at the heart of its broader reality: it’s probably not closing in the near future, but in many ways, it makes very little sense for most skiers and riders. It’s not as crowded as most other California resorts, but it can experience horrific lift lines due to the inadequate lower-mountain lift setup. It has a more family-friendly atmosphere than Mammoth, but the ride up and down the J1 chair will be downright scary for some kids. It’s further away from Los Angeles than Mammoth, and while it’s closer from Reno, it’s then competing with the Tahoe-area resorts, which are a lot closer and often times bigger.

Pricing

June’s biggest benefit may be that in terms of family friendliness, it puts its money where its mouth is. Kids 12 and under ski or ride the resort free, and it is the only ski resort in the state of California to offer such a benefit. However, if you are an adult, despite the resort being an unlimited member of the Ikon Pass and home to some early-season Quad Pack deals, lift tickets still top out at an outrageous $169.

#20 in Colorado

#93 Overall

WRITTEN REVIEW

MOUNTAIN STATS

CATEGORY BREAKDOWN 

See our criteria

Snow:

Resiliency:

Size:

Terrain Diversity:

Challenge:

Lifts:

Crowd Flow:

Facilities:

Navigation:

Mountain Aesthetic:

GOOD TO KNOW

1-Day Ticket: $70-$104

Pass Affiliation: Indy Pass, Freedom Pass

On-site Lodging: Limited

Après-ski: Limited

Nearest Cities: Grand Junction (2hrs), Denver (3 hrs)

Recommended Ability Level:

  +   Pros

• Low crowds

• Strong glades for footprint size

• Mostly simple to navigate footprint

  –   Cons

• Slow lifts

• Barebones on-mountain facilities

• Limited snowmaking

MOUNTAIN STATS

Skiable Footprint: 730 acres

Total Footprint: 740 acres

Lift-Serviced Terrain: 100%

Top Elevation: 9,895 ft

Vertical Drop: 2,010 ft

Lifts: 3

Trails: 77

Beginner: 20%

Intermediate: 55%

Advanced/Expert: 25%

Mountain Review

If shoving elbows in lift lines for the chance at some expert terrain sounds like too much of a headache, visitors looking to venture beyond Colorado’s usual I-70 suspects have an option that flies under the radar: Sunlight Mountain near Glenwood Springs. Located 3 hours west of Denver, Sunlight is usually overshadowed by the four mountains at Aspen/Snowmass, its ritzy neighbor located just an hour south on Highway 82. Eye-watering ticket and lodging prices keep Aspen out of reach for many, and even those accessing it with the Ikon pass often choose to stay around Glenwood and commute up the valley, making a day trip to Sunlight increasingly worth a shot. So can the mountain stand on its own two feet?

Snow & Terrain

While it also has a similar base elevation to Aspen/Snowmass at 7,885 feet, the top of the resort at Compass Peak caps out at 9,895 feet, meaning that Sunlight doesn’t get the same level of snow totals as its neighbors to the south. Combined with limited snowmaking capabilities mainly around the learner Tercero lift, the resort is left more vulnerable to dry spells, with steep expert terrain often opening later in the season. Still, Sunlight catches the same storm systems of high-quality, light Western Slope snow, and can reliably open in December with a solid base developing by January. Due to the low crowd totals and a protective north-facing aspect, large swaths of gladed terrain will remain untouched for days after a snowfall, abundant with pockets of powder. This is good news for visitors who can’t ski at the drop of a hat when a new storm rolls through town.

At 730 acres and 2010 feet of vertical drop, Sunlight is a decently sized offering with varied terrain. Where nearby Ajax and Highlands maintain more verticality, Sunlight is shorter and wider, fanning out from Compass Peak at the top of the resort. It’s by and large pretty easy to get around the mountain, with most runs easily funneling back down to the base area. Runs don’t last as long as offerings from fly-to destinations, requiring more laps on the same slow fixed-grip lifts. It can feel like there’s less mountain available than there actually is, but Sunlight has a few cards up its sleeve to keep visitors engaged.

Beginner Terrain

Beginner terrain exists at Sunlight, but it is limited. The Grizzly Road and Ute runs wrap nicely around both sides of the mountain and are a good level of difficulty for beginners with a couple days already under their belt. The upper-mountain portions of these runs offer the best views on the mountain, with a panorama of the lower Roaring Fork Valley and the 14’er Mount Sopris off to the east. 

The Tercero lift serves the learner area at the base of the mountain, but is a little steeper than a typical bunny hill, while traffic from the rest of the mountain funnels through to the base. I’d recommend that true first-timers look for a mountain with a gentler learning curve and more terrain options. To the western edge of this learner area lies a small terrain park that’s good for beginners who are just getting the hang of park features. It’s best lapped using the slower but shorter Tercero lift.

TRAIL MAP

Intermediate Terrain

There’s enough mountain here to satisfy intermediate and advanced skiers for a solid day. Gentler groomers can be found splintering off to the left and right from the top of the Primo Chair, with the western flank of the mountain abundant in these runs and a handful of easier paths cut through the trees. Steeper blues can be found coming down the main trunk of the mountain beneath Primo and Segundo lifts.

Advanced Terrain

Advanced terrain is somewhat scant, and mostly spread throughout the mountain as standalone mogul runs cut in thin lines from patches of trees. The largest pod of these runs are located toward the lower western portion of the mountain with wide enough tree spacing to get a solid flow going.

Expert Terrain

Sunlight’s expert glades allow the resort to punch above its weight class. There’s plenty of gladed tree terrain to be found, but be wary of those patches unmarked on the map, as some of them are so dense with uncleared saplings and fallen logs that it’s difficult to get any consistent forward momentum (particularly in the trees underneath the midsection of Segundo). At the very least, I’d suggest waiting until later in the season before attempting these forests so that as many obstacles are covered up as possible. The patches of glades marked on the map are more consistently enjoyable, though don’t always have official signage at their entrances. Visitors are never more than a minute or two away from these pockets scattered throughout the mountain. 

If expert visitors want some longer distance challenges, they’ll find themselves lapping the East Ridge with some leg burners like Deception and Que Pasa. Sunlight advertises a section of the East Ridge with some of the steepest (albeit, short in length) lift-served runs in Colorado, with The Heathen capping out at a 52 degree pitch. The big downside is that if you want to continue on any runs below the Midland Traverse, you’re signing up for a hike-out to the base that can last 15-20 minutes from its furthest point, with an elevation gain of roughly 50-100 feet. Of course, that could be seen as a selling point that keeps the snow untracked for those willing to put in the work.

Uphilling & Backcountry

Sunlight has become a popular destination with uphill skiers as the popularity of the sport has grown in recent years. The resort provides an easier route following the Ute run and a shorter, steeper route running straight up the main trunk of the mountain. From there, visitors can ski down the face or continue on to the handful of backcountry trails to the west around Williams Peak. An uphill day ticket or season pass is available for an extra cost, though it’s included with a full season pass.

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Lift Infrastructure

Where Sunlight has recently improved the most is in its lifts. While the setup is admittedly still limited, with no high-speed lifts anywhere on the mountain, the main two lifts Primo and Segundo were upgraded for the 2025-2026 season. The outgoing lifts of the same names were double chairs that were both over 60 years old. Primo is now a quad, and Segundo is now a triple, ensuring reliability and ease of maintenance for years to come. The new lifts are also significantly more comfortable, though you will still have to endure a fixed-grip ride time.

Frustratingly, the lift layout makes it a slog to get from the base area to the peak. Primo is the only lift that takes you to the top of the mountain, and by extension, two-thirds of the entire resort. The Primo loading zone is located just above the learner area, requiring that you first take one of the other lifts in order to get access to a lift within spitting distance of the base. This significantly cuts down on the lap-ability of the best terrain on the mountain in the East Ridge. Even if you wanted to skip the hike-out and make your way to the base earlier via the Midland Traverse, you’re spat out far below the bottom of Primo, making it a lengthy process to try out multiple runs. 

Segundo acts as the main gateway to the resort, serving the western groomers and glades while providing access to Primo Chair and laps on the Terrain Park. As such, there can be some smaller lift lines here, especially in the morning as people make their way up the mountain. But even these short lines have been mitigated by the upgrade to a triple.

On-Mountain Facilities

As a no-frills mountain built mainly for day-trippers, Sunlight runs lean with its facilities. On-mountain, there really only exists a spartan warming hut and pit toilet at the top of Primo, while visitors will need to head to the base for any food. In fact, there’s only a single restaurant and bar at the base, Grizz Grill and Todd’s Tavern, with the former serving typical ski mountain offerings like sandwiches, burgers, fries, and soup. There are plenty of other food and drink options in the town of Glenwood Springs itself, located about 10 miles down the road. Glenwood is well known for its mineral hot springs, which can do wonders on sore legs after a hard day of skiing.

Lodging

The only on-site lodging is the slopeside Brettelberg Condominiums and the Gnarley-Inn, located just steps from the base. Otherwise, there’s a handful of more modern and affordable options in Glenwood Springs. 

Parking & Getting There

Parking is free at Sunlight and fills up on a first-come-first-serve basis, with several spots for EV charging and disability access. A shuttle connecting a handful of locations in Glenwood Springs to Sunlight leaves once in the morning and afternoon Monday through Thursday, and twice in the morning and afternoon Friday through Sunday.

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Future Improvements

In Sunlight’s 2023 Master Plan that was submitted to the US Forest Service, some of the resort’s shortfalls would be addressed. They want to build two new lifts: a previously approved East Ridge fixed grip quad that would eliminate the hike-out and provide direct lift access from the lower parking lots to the upper mountain, and a shorter fixed grip quad “Grizzly” lift located on the groomers above the East Ridge. When paired with a minor terrain expansion, it would increase the amount of lower-intermediate terrain. To address the beginner terrain shortfall, they want to regrade the base area to create a gentler slope with 2 new magic carpets, allowing for a smoother progression curve on the mountain.

Facilities and mountain resilience would improve, with increased capacity at the base restaurant, parking, and a new tubing park at the base. On-mountain would see a new dining experience and bathroom as well as extending snowmaking capabilities all the way to the peak. While there’s no timeline for the implementation of these improvements, it seems like they’d increase quality of life around the mountain without sacrificing much of the low-key charm. 

Verdict

Visiting Sunlight feels like a blast to the past, for better or worse. Other than the recent lift upgrades, little else has changed at the resort in the last 50 years, from the thin crowds and local feel to its simple facilities. It harkens back to a time before billion-dollar megaresorts and multi-mountain passes, almost like the resort defines itself as being not Aspen. Is that overly sentimental? Perhaps. Its distance from major metros, smaller footprint, and lack of resort staples make it difficult to recommend for a dedicated trip. But if you’re local to the region, on your way to a larger destination, or just don’t need all the bells and whistles, Sunlight has carved out a space for itself as a funky alternative with solid intermediate and expert terrain for a good value.