$9 to Ski Purgatory, $99 to Ski Copper, $329 (or $116, or $5.04) to Ski Vail
Colorado, long America’s ski laboratory, shifts focus to lift tickets
Is skiing the most- or least-expensive thing we do?
Each of the following is true about the 2024-25 Colorado ski season:
Single-day, pre-purchased lift tickets at Purgatory are on sale for as little as $9 per day…
While peak-day walk-up lift tickets at Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek will run as high as $329…
But if you purchase those same Vail/Beaver Creek lift tickets right now, they’ll cost $295…
But if you want to ski on those same days at Vail/Beaver Creek, you can purchase a peak-day Epic Day Pass right now for $135. Or you can ski any day of the season at either mountain other than 11 holidays on a $116 Epic Day Pass, but…
Down the road, Copper Mountain will once again sell $99 pre-purchased lift tickets on most Thursdays…
While neighboring Keystone and Vail Mountain will charge as much as $275 and $329, respectively, on those Thursdays…
But a $762 Epic Local Pass includes 10 non-peak days at Vail and unlimited access to Keystone. So if you ski all of Keystone’s 141 planned operating days, plus 10 April days at Vail, you can ski for $5.04 per day. With a $1,025 premium Epic Pass, a skier can clock all 155 of Vail Mountain’s planned operating days for $6.61 per day – and that’s if the mountain doesn’t stay open past its scheduled April 20 closing date, as it often does.
Which is all very confusing, and simultaneously supports two contradictory narratives: that skiing has never been more affordable, and that skiing has never been more expensive. One could convincingly argue both points. But a nuanced analysis suggests an alternate truth: Colorado, as the epicenter of American skiing and ground zero for the bargain season pass concept, continues, in spite of three decades of consolidation, to be the industry’s boldest experimental product laboratory.