Ikon Is First U.S. Ski Pass to China and South Korea – So What?
Yunding Snow Park, China and Mona Yongpyong, South Korea first from each nation to join a U.S.-based multimountain ski pass
Veteran ski writer Leslie Anthony surveyed the then-emerging Chinese ski scene in the January 2007 issue of Powder:
That China is hell-bent on creating a domestic ski scene is not news. That it will look very little like skiing, might be. There are some 200 ski areas in China, but only 30 have functioning lifts, most salvaged from the vast mechanical junkyard of Japan’s disintegrating industry. Elsewhere, donkeys or cars deliver you to the top of tilted farm fields. Devoid of infrastructure or services, it serves some moot purpose for the Ministry of Sport to list these as ski areas.
Mr. Lorie and Mr. Ko had decided to build a Western-style ski resort. Since the cheapest things in China are land and people, this posed little problem. They secured a chunk of worthless montane land covered in hardscrabble forest on the edge of the desert, and started an access road. Although bitingly cold here, it rarely snows, so they needed a massive snowmaking system. That there wasn’t much water to feed it also posed no problem; peasants downstream be damned, they built a dam and coaxed several anemic, spring-fed creeks into a lake. The 10-mile road, heavily excavated runs (including FIS homologated slopes), four lifts, snowmaking, parking and stylish hotel were finished in nine months by a pyramid-style work force of thousands laboring 24/7, qualifying Wanlong as one of the Seven Man-made Wonders of the Ski World. Right up there with the Aguille du Midi, Snowbird and Superpark.
It was very much a case of Build It and They Will Come, with a peculiar Chinese proviso: They Will Come Because They’ve Been Told To.
When China wants something – witness its swapping of gold-medal gymnasts for gold-medal freestyle aerialists – it jumps in with two billion feet and makes it happen. The only large country with the power to motivate an entire citizenry in a single direction, it has decided, albeit ironically, that the bourgeois sport of skiing is an official state-sanctioned activity. The Chinese will ski because it is cachet and Western, not because they particularly like the outdoors; it’s fine if there’s no real mountain and only ersatz snow – they will happily enjoy a knock-off version without the aesthetics. A Rolex by name only.
Nearly 19 years and one Winter Olympics later, China’s ski industry, like everything in this nation that vaulted itself from the 19th Century to the 21st in the space of two decades, has evolved. Which is not to say that no mystery or mystique remains around skiing in the world’s third-largest nation by area. Skiresort.info has inventoried 389 ski areas in China. The China Ski Industry White Book, updated annually by Mr. Wu Bin (Benny Wu) since 2015, suggests there are 748, but does not offer a resort-by-resort inventory, and elsewhere in the report suggests that the number of ski areas could be as high as 935.
It is far easier, however, to determine how many Chinese ski areas have joined U.S.-based multimountain ski passes: exactly one. That would be Yunding Snow Park, which Ikon Pass added ahead of the 2025-26 ski season.
Yunding joined Ikon alongside seven ski areas in Japan – where U.S.-based passes have assembled a coalition of 48 ski areas across more than a dozen prefectures – in October. That same announcement included another first in Asia, as Ikon added Mona Yongpyong, dropping South Korea onto the menu for roving, novelty-seeking skiers.
Adding China and South Korea to U.S.-based ski passes also invites both nations’ maturing ski markets to explore Ikon’s worldwide buffet of European, North American, South American, and Australian partners. But what is skiing in China in 2026? And in South Korea? And what do these two ski areas, in particular, offer to North Americans accustomed to no-boundaries off-piste adventuring or to Euros on 50-centimeter-underfoot carvers sipping espresso as they ride 42-passenger chairlifts and micro-turn the groomers? Let’s take a look:
China – skiing’s Great Wall of Confusion
So how many ski areas does China actually have – 748, 935, or some other number?