Deer Valley, Steamboat Peak-Day Lift Tickets Hit $299 for 2024-25 Ski Season

But that’s barely above last season - have we hit peak lift ticket?

Someday someone will read this and be like “haha you couldn’t buy a Snickers bar now for $299”

If time travel were possible, I would spend about 90 percent of my life skipping around the centuries. Mostly just to stand there and watch people interact before TVs and cars and air-conditioners and Pet Rectangles pulled us all into impenetrable personal comfort bubbles. Like what are those people doing standing three feet apart and making sounds in one another’s direction? Oh that’s right they’re “talking.” How retro. Or maybe I’d go to the future and watch people talk to their pets as they drive them (the pets are driving) to their Martian lake houses for the weekend. Or maybe it’s all just a bad idea.

But one sort of light time travel is possible: the Wayback Machine lets you jump to archived webpages of yesteryear. A few clicks and oh look it’s Winter Park’s website from April 2000:

This probably won a major design award in the year 2000.

Click down a layer to unveil this stunning Winter Park lift ticket price grid from the 1999-2000 ski season:

Multi-day tickets were even cheaper:

Now, as someone who was alive in this not-so-distant past, I will say that no one in “the year 2000,” as we all called it, was like “Wow look at these great bargains on Winter Park lift tickets.” The prices were about average for a mountain of that size at that time. But, still, adjust for inflation and these prices are quite a bit below market from the perspective of a 2024 skier:

Which takes us to present day Baller City. Select mountains – many Alterra-owned – have put 2024-25 lift tickets on sale. Here are what select big names are charging so far:

It’s a little strange that Winter Park lift tickets jumped 18 percent, while Deer Valley’s increased by only 3.5 percent, even though the latter resort is installing three new lifts this summer. Alterra seems awfully hesitant to blow past the $300 mark for a single day of skiing, even though Mountain Capital Partners’ Arizona Snowbowl did it two seasons ago. The company’s CEO, Jared Smith, said a few months back that day-ticket prices had reached a “tipping point.” This feinting below $300 feels like a stall tactic while the company decides what to do.

Vail Resorts’ 2024-25 lift tickets are not on sale yet. Here’s where they topped out for 2023-24:

It’s not hard to imagine Vail pulling some kind of Epic Reboot here, as the company did when it dropped Epic Pass prices by 20 percent ahead of the 2021-22 ski season. Single-day lift tickets are now priced so high in relation to Epic Passes that even cutting them in half would still make them outrageously expensive compared to current season pass rates.

I want to say that $299 is some sort of magic barrier, and that Vail, too, will hesitate to top it. But we all know that won’t happen. In 2006, The New York Post released a shocking dispatch: a 2,400-square-foot, two-family walk-up in “gritty” Red Hook, Brooklyn, had just sold for more than $1 million, a first for the neighborhood. Eighteen years later, Zillow lists dozens of properties in Red Hook for $1 million or more ($1 million in 2006 is roughly equivalent to $1.55 million today). Our standard for acceptable maximum prices changes with time, inflation, and cultural context – it wasn’t so long ago (2007) that skiers were calling $92 Vail Mountain lift tickets “outrageous” (that’s equal to $138 today). What appalls us today could sound like a discount a decade from now. And as Taylor Swift has taught all of us, there is no ceiling on the price of a singular experience.

With high peak-day prices normalized, skiing could branch into any number of alternate realities from here: Uber-style surge-pricing for powder days, a secondary ticket market now that most large resorts limit day ticket sales, tiered pricing to access certain lifts, or more aggressive weekday and afternoon discounting. But it’s hard to imagine anyone coming up with a better idea than the one that’s already sent day-ticket prices spiraling: an Epic or Ikon Pass, purchased now, so that all you have to worry about on a ski day is skiing.

The good fire?

Mt. Baldy GM Robby Ellingson had waited decades for the fire that would chew up the backside. Like The Big One that could one day level Los Angeles, it was inevitable: deadfall, long dry summers, fires tearing across the West. At some point, the mountain had to burn.