Over several months in 2026, The Storm examined hundreds of newspaper articles, ski area master development plans, U.S. Forest Service reports, and other archives documenting the evolution of lift-served skiing across the American West – and, in particular, Colorado – since the end of World War II. This fossil record of a mostly pre-internet culture captures the facts and sentiments of skiing’s past unfiltered by nostalgia or selective memory. This is the sixth in a series of articles summarizing those findings.
Look at this fun thing I just did - I plugged Vail Mountain’s 1999-2000 lift ticket price of $61 into an online future-inflation predictor to see when typical economic conditions could have been expected to compound that price to the ski area’s $374 top rate for winter 2026-27. The answer is 2070.
Good job, Vail - you beat inflation by 44 years. Vail Mountain lift tickets would, at their current $374 top rate, hit $1,163 in 2070, according to Tom (who apparently owns the above calculator). But applying the Epic Inflation rate of seven percent annually since 1999 forward to 2070, you could be charging the moron plebes your customers $7,206 per day of skiing! Genius!
OK, you got me: “Tom’s Inflation Calculator” does not qualify as a bulletproof source. But this absurdist exercise does draw a contrast between the runaway price structures of skiing’s two main lift-access products. The lift ticket has leapt into (a theoretical) 2070; while the season pass has hit 88-miles-per-hour and traveled back to 1970: Steamboat’s 2026-27 season pass (a full Ikon) debuted at $1,399, essentially the same rate, adjusted for inflation, that the mountain charged for its 1972-73 season pass ($175, equal to $1,401 in 2026 dollars); Vail is even wilder, with a 2026 Epic Pass costing $1,089 in March - $718 less than a 1970-71 season pass ($215 then, $1807 inflation-adjusted) and more than $2,000 inflation-adjusted dollars cheaper than Vail’s 1986-87 season pass ($1,025, or $3,126 inflation-adjusted).
This century gap is a problem. Because lift ticket anachronisms turbocharge the false narrative that skiing is not affordable, which overshadows the true narrative that skiing actually kind of is more affordable now than it has been since Nixon was president, at least for people who ski a lot and think ahead.