The streak is over.
Colorado ski areas saw a 24% collapse in visitation in 2025-26, marking the sharpest downturn for the state’s signature resort industry in more than 40 years. After four years of record-setting traffic, visits to the state’s 26 ski hills fell to 10.5 million in 2025-26, down from 13.9 million the previous winter.
That’s the lowest showing for Colorado ski areas since 1991-92.
Not even the COVID-triggered early resort closures in March 2020 marked a steeper decline, when skier visitation to Colorado resorts fell 19%.
The 2025-26 winter-that-wasn’t eclipsed the lousy snow season of 2011-12, when visits fell 9%. But the 2025-26 winter did not unseat the dismally snowless 1980-81, when visits to Colorado’s ski areas fell 30% in what many consider one of the most challenging ski seasons on record. (Visitation data are murky for the 1976-77 season, but 50-year-old newspaper clippings from that largely pre-snowmaking season indicates it remains the ugliest ever for Colorado ski hills.)
The wreck of a winter — with unseasonably warm temperatures and a deficit of snowfall leading to one of the worst snowpacks in 50 years in Colorado — follows four years of record-setting visitation to the state’s ski areas. Since 2021-22, the state’s ski hills logged record visitation for four consecutive seasons, including the all-time showing of 14.8 million visits in 2022-23. The balmy winter eroded the number of days resorts were open this season, with the average for 2025-26 falling to 129 days, down from the 20-year average of 144 days.
Nationally, ski areas logged around 52.6 million visits last winter, down from the second-busiest season ever in 2024-25, when the country’s nearly 500 ski hills hosted 61.6 million visits. The feast-to-famine winter of 2025-26 ranks 32nd out of 48 seasons on record.
The National Ski Areas Association numbers show 20.1 million visits to more than 90 resorts in the group’s six-state Rocky Mountain region, down 24% from 26.5 million in 2024-25.
Season pass boom helps with weak winters
Visits to ski hills are not as critical a barometer of resort industry health as they were 20 years ago, when resorts leaned heavily on good snow to sell lift tickets. But with the now ubiquitous advance-purchase season passes, resort companies are making money months before the snow flies.
In 2015-16, 51% of skiers bought day tickets to go skiing. A decade later, that percentage is 32% as season pass purchases boom, according to the industry’s 2024-25 Kottke demographic report. The number of season passes sold by U.S. resorts in 2024-25 was up 81% from the number sold in 2015-16. The extra-large ski areas — like many of Colorado’s destination resorts — have seen season pass sales more than double in the last decade.
All those advanced sales of passes like the Epic or Ikon mean resort operators are not particularly pinched in low-snow years. Vail Resorts, which accounts for more than a third of all Colorado ski visits with traffic to its Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone and Vail ski areas, reported a 25% decline in visits to its five resorts in Colorado and one in Utah. But lift ticket revenue for the company fell only 5.6% for the 2025-26 season, proving the company’s business strategy of shifting some of the uncertainty around snowfall over to skiers who buy season passes in the summer.
And it’s not just the major players like Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co. that are finding benefits in advanced ticket and pass sales. The National Ski Areas Association’s annual 2024-25 Economic Analysis of U.S. Ski Areas surveyed 145 ski areas to show rising revenues and reduced operational costs delivering record profits to ski area operators. The operating profit margin for those resorts — the money left over after paying costs — is more than 33% with profits nearly doubling in the decade since 2015-16.
But this season could flatten that trajectory as spending dwindled and resort operators saw few dollars rolling into ski schools, rental shops and on-mountain restaurants.
Spending in mountain towns falls for the first time since pandemic
Even though resort operators are reducing their exposure to bad snow seasons, there’s still pain when the snow fails to fly. Especially in communities that rely heavily on hordes of lift riders flocking every winter. This year the crowds were hardly hordes. That means mountain towns are tightening belts after tax revenues melted like snowflakes.
The Colorado Sun tracks taxable sales in 18 Colorado high country towns and cities. From December through February, the total taxable spending for those 18 small and large communities from December 2025 through February 2026 was $2.82 billion, down from $2.93 billion in the same span of 2024-25. (The most recent sales tax report from the state is February.)
For the last four seasons the growth in overall spending in the 18 communities has not kept pace with inflation. Either skiers are not spending as much on their holiday or fewer skiers are spending more.
It’s likely a mix of both as lodge owners ratcheted up room rates as occupancies declined. Either way, take out the pandemic-challenged ski season of 2020-21 and the 2025-26 marks the first annual decline in mountain town spending in more than a decade. (It’s important to note that state reports on sales tax revenues include spending by both locals and visitors, so the spending numbers include, for example, locals buying stuff on Amazon.)
The decline in visitation to Colorado ski areas is evidenced also in traffic through the Interstate 70 Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels. The number of westbound and eastbound vehicles driving through the twin tunnels from December through April was 4.89 million. Take out the pandemic-shortened season of 2019-20 and that is the least amount of ski season tunnel traffic since 2014-15 and below the 20-year average, which started when Colorado had about 1.4 million fewer residents.
Canada wins 2025-26
Canadian ski hills were exceptionally busy in the 2025-26 ski season, with both ample snow and local skiers, irked by U.S. politics, not heading south for their winter holidays. The neighbors from the north led a now nearly two-year, countrywide collapse in international tourism, with a 30.2% decline in Canadian winter visitors to Western U.S. mountain resorts last winter, according to Destimetrics, the research wing of Outside-owned Inntopia that measures lodging occupancy at 17 mountain destinations in seven Western states.
Visits to Quebec’s 73 ski areas climbed 5.1% last winter, reaching 6.3 million visits, according to news last week from the Quebec Ski Areas Association.
The Big 3 three-resort complex in Alberta’s Canadian Rockies had a banner winter, with Banff Sunshine Village ski area announcing last week it would reopen June 5 for summer skiing into July. Those three resorts around Banff and Lake Louise saw a 50% annual increase in visits from American skiers. More than a third of visitors to Banff Sunshine, Lake Louise and Mt. Norquay ski areas last winter said they changed their holiday plans and re-routed to the Big 3. Visitors from Colorado and Utah climbed 50% over the previous year, said Chris Lamothe, the systems director for the Big 3.
“There is definitely some momentum there,” Lamothe said.
It’s not just good snow that helped buoy Canadian ski hills in 2025-26.
“The primary factor continues to be trade and politics,” said Tom Foley, the director of business intelligence at Outside who helped found Destimetrics. “We can actually closely correlate declines in bookings to administration statements around sovereignty and trade.”
Foley, a data connoisseur, even charted that Canadian angst last year, connecting Canadians cancelling U.S. vacations with public statements around the Trump administration tariffs.
“Trade action has offended most Canadians, who feel they’ve been betrayed by a long-standing partner, and comments about sovereignty are an affront and have been taken very personally,” Foley said. “It’s not business, it’s personal.”
Not an evenly spread decline between small, large ski areas
Colorado’s smaller hills did not see as steep declines as the larger ski areas.
Davey Pitcher, the owner of Wolf Creek ski area in southern Colorado, counted more than 240,000 visits, marking the third-busiest winter ever for the 1,600-acre ski hill. Wolf Creek measured only 191 inches of snowfall for the winter, well below its annual average of more than 350 inches.
Still, that 191 inches likely ranked as one of the more bountiful tallies in the state.
“We truly do get the most snow in Colorado on a pretty consistent basis,” Pitcher said. “But this kind of season is not good for the industry and it’s not good for the long-term outlook for the business. In the long run, a season like this, you can get people who decide they are not going to be skiers anymore, especially if you start to pack these kinds of years together.”
Before the pandemic, Pitcher averaged around 200,000 visits a year at Wolf Creek. Since COVID, he’s seen annual visitation reach 260,000, like it did in 2021-22. That’s reflective of the larger trend of more people heading outside during the lockdown and then returning to outdoor play. Nationally, both 2024 and 2025 saw all-time records for people recreating outdoors, with more than 180 million Americans saying they spend time outside.
But Pitcher also sees his visitation surge connected to a growing population of skiers who are seeking smaller ski hills as they avoid larger resorts swarming with skiers using the mega-passes. Wolf Creek does not partner with any large pass program and Pitcher keeps his prices simple, with walk-up ticket prices usually around $100 or less.
“I think that overall trend bodes well for us and a lot of the smaller ski areas in the country,” Pitcher said.
But he’s still keeping a close eye on the sky.
“I’ve been in this business all my life and after a year like this, you are always worrying what the next year will look like,” Pitcher said. “We will be anxiously awaiting the flakes flying in the fall.”