Is Skiing Too Expensive, Or Are You Just Bad at Shopping?

Breckenridge isn’t, like, the only place to go snowskiing.

If we treated shoes like skiing, everyone would walk around barefoot

There are many, many things that I hate about this widely circulated, roundly celebrated but poorly reasoned and hyperbolic shitpile of an article that ran in Slate late last year: a romantic subtext that celebrates and conflates “dirtbags” (whatever that means), with skier authenticity; the way it ignores the impact of short-term rentals, NIMBYs, and remote-work relocators on housing pricing and availability; and its assumption that “almost every good mountain” has been claimed by either Epic or Ikon, when in fact far more mountains remain independent than not, many of them quite large and quite good.

But the dumbest paragraph in this very dumb article involves a hypothetical idiot who wants to take his kid skiing but by gum just look at these prices:

The story is different, though, for a working dad in Denver who wants to take his kid up to Breckenridge for a day in late December to try out skiing. He will find that everything that is not a season pass is criminally expensive. Parking is $20; his lift ticket $251 (online—at the window it’ll be $279); basic rental gear $78; burger, fries, and a Gatorade for lunch $35; end-of-day Coors Light $8; and $418 for the kid’s rental, ticket, and group lesson (at least the lesson includes lunch). All in, an $800-plus day.

My first question for you, Hypothetical Dad in Denver, is why you are forcing your kid to ski at ungodly busy and confusing Breckenridge “to try out skiing.” My second question is why you can’t figure out the internet, and choose among the dozens of cheaper and easier ways to accomplish this. Here are four:

• If the kid is too young to appreciate the difference between Keystone and a pile of snow pushed into a pyramid in the King Soopers parking lot, take him to Echo Mountain, 53 minutes west of downtown Denver, less than half of which will be spent on I-70. Adult all-day lift tickets start at $59 and top out at $77. Kids’ all-day lift tickets run $40 to $50. Want to ski after work/school? Score night session tickets for $35 adult and $20 for kids. Rental packages run $45 adult and $35 for kids. In lieu of ski school, a team of so-called Echo Mountain Ambassadors roam the beginner areas to dispense tips as needed. Parking is free. Echo’s vertical drop is just 600 feet, but as someone who’s skied frequently with children, I can confirm that’s plenty. Bring snacks. There. I just saved you like $700.

  

• If the kid has never skied before, a new, carpet-only bump called Hoedown Hill opened this winter in Windsor, an hour north of Denver on the outskirts of Fort Collins. It’s 130 gentle vertical feet accessible with a $35 lift ticket. They don’t rent skis onsite, but recommend you to a nearby shop where daily adult rentals run $32. Kids rental packages are $17. Parking is free. It’s in the suburbs so you can take the kid to like, Taco Bell for lunch.

  

• Rather than exiting at Frisco for Breckenridge, keep right on going to I-70 exit 195. Copper Mountain is sitting right off the exit, but drive past it. In 30 miles you’ll reach Ski Cooper, which has no snowmaking, no crowds, and $65 advanced-purchase adult weekday lift tickets (kids are $40). Those same rates jump to $80 and $50 for a weekend outing. You can score $30 Thursday tickets on eight dates in 2024 (all now past). Rental gear runs between $30 and $55. Lessons are quite cheap. Is Cooper Breck? No. It’s a 1,200-vertical-foot ski area served by two antique chairlifts. But, again, we’re talking about a ski day with kids – that’s plenty of hill. And if the little one is adventurous, take them into double-black-diamond Tennessee Creek Basin and lap the T-bar all day.

  

• Or don’t even bother passing through the Eisenhower Tunnel and stop at Loveland, which, at 1,800 acres, is larger than Arapahoe Basin or Aspen Mountain or Highlands. Adult lift tickets cost more here: $149. But kids tickets run just $45. And for those who are just getting going, a “Loveland Valley” ticket – which is limited to lifts 7 and 3 and the Magic Carpet (essentially a separate ski area disconnected from the rest of the resort), are $50 adult and $30 for children. Adult rentals run $70 at Loveland, but kids are just $45, and, this being Colorado, you can always rent for less at a ski shop in advance.

This whole notion that skiing-is-unaffordable-because-skiing-last-minute-at-Breckenridge-is-unaffordable-for-someone-who-owns-no-ski-gear-and-cannot-plan-far-enough-in-advance-to-smuggle-their-own-grocery-store-Gatorade-into-the-lodge is one of the dumber narratives in American commerce. Like imagine if I went car shopping and I only went to the Mercedes dealership and I left all exasperated about “how can anyone afford these things?” But nobody does that because everyone knows there are cheaper and shittier cars out there, and there are cheaper and shittier ski areas than Breckenridge, even practically next door.

I will avoid, for now, arguing that skiing at Breckenridge, with its unlimited access on the $676 Epic Local Pass (early-bird 2023-24 prices) and nearly unlimited access on the $546 Summit Value Pass, is actually probably way too cheap, which is why skiing there often feels less like skiing and more like entering some weird futuristic survivalist game show in which you spend seven hours trying to unlock lift-maze puzzles before your helmet sprouts a helicopter blade and tosses you helplessly into the stratosphere. Instead, I will move onto exhibit B, a poorly contextualized panic piece from the San Francisco Gate entitled “You now have to be rich to ski in Tahoe.”

Sure. If you have the advanced-planning acuity of a goldfish, insist on only riding at the largest ski areas, own no equipment, and are in need of ski lessons. The article focuses on walk-up window lift ticket prices, full-day private lessons, and gear rented on the mountain, and unsurprisingly concludes that one day of skiing will cost you more than a month of rent in South Lake. The author prices a week’s vacation for a family of four at Northstar at around $12,000.

OK, let’s try this again. Instead of driving straight to Palisades, Heavenly, Northstar, or Kirkwood, you could:

• Buy the $267, unlimited access, no-blackout FOMO spring pass at Sierra-at-Tahoe, a 2,212-vertical-foot, 2,000-acre monster that averages 480 inches of snow per season. This is not some bumblefuck operation that no one’s ever heard of. The joint runs three high-speed quads and offers some of the best terrain in California, and you can ski there the rest of this season for less than the cost of a peak one-day lift ticket at Palisades Tahoe ($279) or Northstar ($269).

  

• But if you’re really a beginner, you don’t need 2,000 acres and glades and high-speed cabana lifts. You just need a little bump to slide around on. I present to you the pricing grid for 740-vertical-foot Donner Ski Ranch, perched on the north side of the lake:

• Six hundred foot Tahoe Donner offers similar pricing, as does Powdr-owned Soda Springs, where an unlimited season pass is $289.

• But if you’re looking for real vert, Tahoe is encircled by independent gems. Homewood, which rises 1,650 feet directly and gloriously off the lake, sells adult one-day lift tickets starting at $104. Weekend skiing at 1,650-acre, 1,500-vertical-foot Sugar Bowl is expensive, but weekday lift tickets are $99 through most of March, even with a giant storm en route. Twelve-hundred-acre, 1,800-vertical-foot Mt. Rose offers specials throughout the week, including $69 lift tickets from noon to six on Fridays. Add on adult rentals for $50 and child rentals for $30, anytime.

  

  Homewood rises 1,650 vertical feet directly off Lake Tahoe.

Trying to find the most expensive possible version of a thing is a fun American pastime. That’s why we have Zillow. But finding the most expensive possible version of a thing and saying that’s the thing is just lazy. Vail’s Tahoe Local Pass – good for all non-holidays at Heavenly, Northstar, and Kirkwood, debuted at just $575 last spring. It went off sale in December for just $654. An even cheaper version, which blacks out Saturdays at Northstar and Kirkwood, sold from $489 to $561 for the 2023-24 ski season.

Yes, you have to plan ahead. But those Epic Passes (including the ultra-bargain Epic Day Passes), along with equally inexpensive passes for hundreds of independent ski areas, will be on sale within a couple of weeks. Why not, you know, buy one? Subscribe below if you haven’t already, because season passes will be just about all I’m talking about for the next six weeks: