NO NAME BASIN — Bob Nicolls steps out of the growling Pistenbully snowcat and points his ski pole across the horizon.
“Look out there. You can’t see our base area. the parking lot, the highway. You just see wilderness,” says Nicolls, whose investment group bought Monarch ski area in 2002. “I think this is what people are looking for today.”
Nicolls and his Monarch investment team have put nearly $10 million into the ski area in the last 23 years. That includes an expanded base facilities, parking, surface lifts and more terrain in Mirkwood Basin. This season, the Monarch owners are unveiling their largest project yet. The 377-acre No Name Basin expansion opens this winter with 10 new runs and a new fixed-grip triple chair accessing intermediate, advanced and gladed terrain.
Every year, the Monarch owners pump cash into improvements. And each year they grow their business. In the last seven years, annual sales of Monarch season passes have climbed anywhere from 7% to 20% a year. Visits have nearly doubled since the owners took over in 2002. The mountain sold 16,000 season passes last season. The owners have not taken on any debt as they improve the ski area that straddles the Continental Divide.
“I think people are getting exhausted by driving to a big ski area and having a big ski area experience with the traffic and crowds and parking and $29 cheeseburgers,” says Nicolls during an owners tour of the new terrain in February. “I think people appreciate the fact that coming to Monarch they are not being overwhelmed and ripped off. It’s a return to the classic ski experience.”
The addition of No Name Basin at Monarch — several years in the making and a rare Forest Service expansion of a Colorado resort’s Special Use Permit boundary — is the hallmark upgrade of Colorado’s 2025-26 ski season.
Next up would be another independent: Sunlight Mountain Resort this winter unveils its largest-ever capital project with two new chairlifts replacing the legendary Primo and Segundo fixed-grip doubles that date back to the 1970s. A new quad is replacing the Primo chair and a hand-me-down triple from Arapahoe Basin is replacing the Segundo chair, which first ferried skiers at Aspen in the 1950s before moving up the valley to Sunlight in 1974.
And joining the independent ski area investment boom trend, Loveland ski area this month opened up a new fixed-grip quad built by Grand Junction’s Leitner Poma, replacing the 42-year-old Lift 7 double chair.
Aspen Snowmass has a new six-pack chair at Elk Camp at Snowmass ski area, replacing a quad. The 3,342-acre Roaring Fork Valley ski area also replaced the Cirque platter chair with a double T-bar. This winter Snowmass also will debut its first all-electric restaurant with the renovated Ullrhof eatery.
After a frenzy of lift building in recent years, the record-setting investment in Colorado resorts is taking a breather for 2025-26. Next year will see a return of the lift replacement movement.
The Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests is reviewing a proposal by Telluride ski area to replace the 1975 Lift 7 and the Lift 8, which was first installed in 1972 and then moved to its current downtown Telluride location in 1985. The ski area also is planning to replace the High Camp warming hut atop Lift 12 with a full-service, 2,000 square-foot restaurant. The life replacements were first outlined in the ski area’s 2017 Master Development Plan.
In the days before the federal shutdown, the White River National Forest approved upgrades for next year at Vail ski area, including replacing the four-pack Chair 21 with a six-seat lift and replacing the triple Chair 15 with a detachable quad.
And taking a page from Sunlight, Powderhorn is recycling the old Elk Camp chair from Snowmass to replace its 54-year-old West End double chair.
A very slow start
Colorado’s snowpack is 30% of median right now, following an exceptionally dry October. This has been one of the slowest starts to the ski season.
The eight resorts that are turning chairs this week are relying almost exclusively on manmade snow, with the most recent storms in the third week of November accounting for pretty much the only natural snowfall so far this winter. Arapahoe Basin, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Eldora, Keystone, Loveland, Steamboat, Vail and Winter Park are open.
Last year Colorado’s ski areas logged 13.8 million visits, marking the third busiest season for the most skied state in the country. Colorado’s busiest ski seasons ever have been the last four winters since 2021. Nationally, skier visits reached 61.5 million in 2024-25, marking the second busiest season ever.
The number of skiers booking lodging for the 2025-26 ski season at resorts in the West is roughly equal to last year. That’s according to DestiMetrics, the group that surveys occupancy and reservation across 28,000 rooms in 17 mountain communities in seven Western states. Bookings for November, December and March are up over the 2024-25 ski season but down in January and February.
But lodging businesses are keeping room rates high this season — averaging $695 a night across the DestiMetrics survey — so revenues are climbing while reservations on the books are down 0.4% for the six-month winter season. October bookings typically set the stage for winter, but the sunny skies and lack of snow appears to have delayed interest in ski holidays.
“Hopefully the snow starts falling and the phones start ringing,” said Eliza Voss with the Aspen Chamber Resort Association.
The 2025 summer season was slower than previous years, a warning sign that the coming winter season could see a similar decline. But those higher room rates — and really the increasing cost of everything in the high country — is keeping winter spending near all-time highs in Colorado’s mountain towns. The Sun’s tally of taxable sales in 18 mountain towns from November through April shows spending for the winter season around $5 billion, mirroring the 2023-24 season.
A precipitous decline in international visitors to Colorado could wreak havoc for resorts that rely on steady streams of tourists from afar. Destimetrics shows bookings from Canada, which typically sends the most international visitors to Western ski areas, are down 52.9% compared to this time last year. Canadian holidays in the U.S. have been down that much for the last six months. Bookings from Australia and New Zealand are down 28.4% while reservations from Mexico and Western Europe are up over the same period last year.
Still, momentum for overnight travelers on the Western Slope is high. The eight commercial airports in western Colorado — in Aspen, Eagle. Durango, Grand Junction, Gunnison, Hayden, Montrose and Telluride — saw a record 1.7 million boardings in 2024.
The event schedule at Colorado resorts is overflowing for 2025-26. Resorts are going big with events this year, with concerts, contests and festivals just about every weekend.
Leading that events calendar are several high-profile competitions leading up to the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.
- Copper Mountain kicks off the alpine season with the debut of the Stifel Copper Cup Nov. 27-30. The men’s and women’s World Cup races anchor a festival in Copper’s village.
- Beaver Creek hosts the annual Birds of Prey World Cup races Dec. 4-7 with four days of music and festival around the men’s downhill, super-g and giant slalom races.
- Steamboat kicks off the Colorado World Cup freeskiing and snowboard contests with the Visa Big Air event Dec. 11-13, marking the first Olympic qualifying big air event for the U.S. Freeski and Snowboard teams.
- The Toyota Grand Prix at Copper Mountain Dec. 17-20 is the first U.S. World Cup ski and snowboard halfpipe contests of the season.
- The Rockstar Energy Open, while not a World Cup contest, will host high-flying snowboarders in Breckenridge Dec. 19-21.
- The Toyota U.S. Grand Prix moves to Buttermilk this season, with halfpipe, slopestyle and big air competitions from Jan. 4-10.
- Later that month, the world’s top freeskiers and snowboarders return to Buttermilk for Aspen’s 25th hosting of the Winter X Games, Jan. 23-25.
- After the Olympics, the snowboarders will be back at Buttermilk for the second running of The Snow League, Feb. 27-28.