A Snapshot of America’s 3,193 Ski Lifts
Including the ones we usually ignore
I use Lift Blog every day. It is the most useful and reliable database in modern North American skiing, itemizing the height, length, make, vintage, and major modification history of every lift in North America (with pictures!). Without this resource, my job would be more difficult and time-consuming. I recommend subscribing to the site’s email updates, which will do a better job than any other source of updating you on the happenings within the North American aerial lift world.
But Lift Blog is not exhaustive. The founder, Peter Landsman, who was one of my first Storm Skiing Podcast guests in 2019, has, he’s told me, no interest in ropetows or carpets, and he does not inventory them. Which I get. But that leaves out more than 1,000 ski lifts.
And as I prep for the podcast and write about the broader lift-served skiing world, I need to stay attuned to evolving surface lift fleets. Sure, they’re low and slow, but carpets are an increasingly crucial part of the beginner ski experience. And while ropetows have been excised from most beginner areas, they are playing an increasingly important role as park-lappers and low-cost transfer lifts.
I also often seek aggregate lift statistics to answer questions like: how many six-packs are there in Vermont? How many trams operate in America? Are there more fixed-grip or detachable quads in the country? In most cases, there is no ready resource that aggregates that information. This might seem like asking “how many leaves are on that Oak tree?” And the answer is “who cares, Man. A bunch.” Maybe I have some wires crossed or maybe it’s journalistic paranoia of being a one-man shop with no editorial oversight or fact-checker – the need to be factually correct is the bedrock of this whole operation. But I need the context, and I need to see everything in one place.
So I’ve added a lift breakdown to the U.S. American Lift-Served Snosportskiing Masterchart. It itemizes the number of each type of lift at each ski area, then adds them up by resort and by state. Separate tabs break down lift totals nationally, by state, and by region. Here’s a snapshot of America’s 3,193 ski lifts:
These are living lists, linked directly to the mastersheet, so they should be updated-ish at all times. They include summer 2025 demolitions and installs. A few notes:
This list is a gigantic agglomeration of Lift Blog, individual resort stats pages, personal experience, and random tidbits scraped from the internet’s undersides. There is no version of reality in which it is 100 percent accurate (it is probably 99 percent accurate). This is because counting is hard, for the following reasons:
Ski areas keep secrets
Many small, surface-lift-only ski areas maintain no trailmap and no real website. I did my best to verify which hills ran what sort of lifts and how many, but please correct me where I missed, overstated, or otherwise botched a stat line.
Many ski areas that do maintain trailmaps label their lifts with ambiguous language such as “surface lift.” This could be a T-bar, Poma, rope, carpet, or neighborhood donkey. Usually I can figure it out, but sometimes I’m making an educated guess.
Here’s a fun game: try finding all eight carpet lifts on Big Sky’s trailmap. Deer Valley doesn’t bother itemizing its five carpets on the trailmap, bunching most of them together under a “carpet” icon. Ditto with Steamboat’s six carpets. Some ski areas, like Mammoth, reserve carpets or other surface lifts for ski school students, and therefore don’t include them in their online lift inventory.
Lifts can be complicated machines
Some lifts that skiers experience as two separate lifts are in fact one machine. I count them as two chairs because: skiers cannot ride them contiguously; they are labelled as separate machines on the trailmap; and one side can and sometimes does load skiers without the other, pending snow coverage. Such lifts include: Double Diamond and Southern Cross at Stevens Pass; North Pole/South Pole at Whitecap; lifts 1 / 2 and 3 / 4 at Little Switzerland; and Continental Divide at Buena Vista.
On the flip side, several gondolas and chairlifts are constructed as two distinct machines, but skiers experience them as one continuous ride (though they can typically unload and/or load at some midpoint). These include the Collins quad at Alta and gondolas at Killington, Palisades Tahoe, Mammoth, and other resorts.
Lifts are useful for things besides skiing (I fact-checked this)
Hundreds of ski areas now run tubing operations, typically serviced by ropetows or carpets directly adjacent to ski terrain. In rare instances (Four Seasons, New York), the two activities share a carpet. But this is not The Storm Tubing Newsletter, so I did not include lifts that are exclusively used for tubing in my inventory.
I did not include any non-ski, tourist attraction lifts, such as the trams in Palm Springs or New York City. Lift Blog does itemize these by state, if you’re interested.
I did, however, count the trams skiers can use to access Ober, Tennessee and Sandia Peak, New Mexico, even though these are not lappable ski lifts, operate separately, and require an additional fare. Perhaps this is dumb but so is this whole exercise.
There are too many versions of things
While I did create separate categories for high-speed triples (there are only two, at Aspen and Red Lodge), and pulse gondolas versus regular gondolas, I did not split out the following:
Pulse quads – as far as I can tell, there are only two, and they are at Yellowstone Club, which means most of us will never see them without a telescope.
Handle tows (Mt. Spokane) from ropetows without handles (Nub’s Nob), or fast ropes (Hyland Hills) from slow ones (A-Basin)
Trams by capacity. Snowbasin’s tram holds 15 passengers. Nearby Snowbird’s can loft 120. They’re both trams, even though they are about as similar as a pumpkin is to a beachball. But no two trams are the same, there aren’t that many of them, and the only ones that matter anyway are at Jackson and Snowbird, unless you’re in New England.
There are too many variables
Counting ski areas is like counting flocking birds. They move around too much, and there are too many of them. I covered this in detail when I released my recent itemization of which ski areas operated and which didn’t for the 2024-25 winter (to underscore the point, I’ve confirmed since that writing that an additional ski area, Elko, Nevada, failed to open this past season). Because of the way my data is organized, it’s a bit more complex to omit lifts from closed ski areas than it is to banish the ski area itself from the active list. So here's how I compromised:
If a ski area was open for winter 2023-24, missed this year, and plans to re-open next season (Homewood, Mt. Lemmon, Badger Pass, Mt. Waterman LOL), I included its lifts here.
If a ski area has missed more than two consecutive seasons and does not plan to open next winter (Mountain High North, Hesperus, Cockaigne, Spout Springs), I omitted its lifts.
If a ski area is a mess but seems to be actively working toward operating (Sitzmark, Sleeping Giant), then I included its lifts.
With that established, let’s take a deeper look at how America’s ski lift fleet breaks down by type, state, and region: