The United States as a ski destination
The United States runs more ski areas than any other country and records the most skier visits: 492 areas were operating in 2024/25, drawing 61.5 million visits — the second-highest total since counting began in 1978. It is also the most regionally lopsided ski nation, with the Rocky Mountain states alone taking 42.9% of all visits.1
- Operating ski areas, 2024/25
- 492
- Skier visits, 2024/25
- 61.5 million
- Rocky Mountain share of visits
- 42.9%
What it is known for
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Lift-served vertical, not linked valleys
American resorts are generally single mountains served by their own lift network rather than the valley-to-valley circuits common in the Alps, so the interesting number is vertical and lift efficiency rather than kilometres of linked piste.1
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Tree skiing and marked glades
Terrain below the treeline is skied deliberately rather than avoided, and glades are signed and patrolled — a category that barely appears on European piste maps.1
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A very wide spread of scale
The 492 operating areas run from a few hundred metres of vertical on a Midwest hill to the large Rocky Mountain resorts; in the app's US corpus only 14 areas exceed 100 km of downhill terrain.1
Resort guides
238 of the 1,311 ski areas mapped in the SkiAllDay app are in the United States, together 8,709 km of downhill terrain and 2,235 lifts. A cross-border area counts in every country it touches. The guides below are the ones written up so far.
| Resort | Pistes | Vertical | Lifts | Piste / lift km | Lift min / ski hr | North-facing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aspen Snowmass Colorado | 237 km | 1,340 m | 20 | 2.50 | 35 | 94% |
| Beaver Creek Colorado (Eagle County, Sawatch Range) | 150 km | 1,231 m | 24 | 2.88 | 37 | 77% |
| Big Sky Resort Montana | 250 km | 1,330 m | 40 | 3.33 | 26 | 51% |
| Breckenridge Summit County, Colorado | 153 km | 988 m | 35 | 1.80 | 46 | 51% |
| Copper Mountain Colorado (Summit County, Tenmile Range) | 126 km | 832 m | 23 | 2.66 | 57 | 80% |
| Deer Valley Utah (Wasatch Back, Summit County) | 202 km | 951 m | 31 | 2.55 | 40 | 61% |
| Keystone Summit County, Colorado | 135 km | 953 m | 21 | 2.55 | 25 | 52% |
| Park City Mountain Resort Utah (Wasatch Back, Summit County) | 250 km | 983 m | 41 | 2.84 | 33 | 66% |
| Powder Mountain Utah (Ogden Valley, Weber County) | 68 km | 610 m | 12 | 6.61 | 14 | 61% |
| Steamboat Yampa Valley, Colorado | 165 km | 1,118 m | 23 | 2.37 | 42 | 33% |
| Vail Colorado (Eagle County, Gore Range) | 234 km | 1,073 m | 32 | 2.54 | 32 | 57% |
| Winter Park Colorado (Grand County, Front Range) | 143 km | 933 m | 23 | 2.42 | 42 | 70% |
Piste, vertical and lift counts are the operators' own figures. The last three columns are measured from each resort's lift and piste network — see any resort page for how. Piste per lift km describes how sparse a lift network is, not how good it is: sort on it to find long runs off few lifts, or on lift minutes per ski hour to find quick laps.