Itemizing the Largest, Tallest, and Snowiest American Ski Areas
*Based on a true story
I like stats. When they’re real. But not when they’re marketing fictions knitted together by rounding up, wishful thinking, and tales of the Great Blizzard of 1849. I’m not saying anyone cheats on purpose. But when the neighbor across the street claims 300 inches and you’re measuring 150, you either fight them or do your own rounding. This truthiness expresses itself differently across regions. The Midwest lies the most about vertical. The East lies the most about snowfall. The West exaggerates acreage. Some ski areas are precise and some just seem to nod and say “yeah 500 sounds good.” Imagine if this mentality bled into sports? “Yeah, Tom Brady threw about 50 touchdowns per year. Yeah, I know the records say he only did that once and his average was 27.5 TDs per season, but let’s just call it 50, OK?”
I mean, not really. But since I left my civil engineering and meteorology degrees in my other pants, I’m going to have to go with the ski areas’ offical stats. Yes, many third-party sites document ski areas’ average annual snowfall and skiable acreage, but they are so inconsistent that trying to reconcile them would be to exorcise ski areas to the same unmeasurable category as blackholes and phytoplankton.
I’m not going to name any offending ski areas today – I’ve given most of them a chance to clarify unclear numbers, and will update the tables below as new info rolls in. For now, here’s my best understanding of the tallest, biggest, and snowiest ski areas across America, with breakout lists for the East and Midwest:
VERTICAL DROP
The Rocky Mountain ski areas are pretty fair when it comes to vert. That’s probably in part because elevation is woven into the cultural dialect of the West in ways it isn’t in most of the rest of the nation, and partly the same reason that rich people don’t brag about money: when you have a lot of something, you don’t need to embellish.
The only real caveat to our top 20 is that our current American Vert leader – Timberline Lodge – only offers lift-served vertical in one direction: down. Meaning you can ski from the top of the lifts to the bottom of the legacy Summit ski area, but you have to take a series of shuttles, chairlifts, hot-air balloons, and elephant trains to get back up. The ski area plans to eventually connect the whole circus with a gondola from Government Camp up to the legacy Timberline lifts, but for now, ascending is a bit of an adventure.
And I’ll point out that I’m only concerned with lift-served vertical here. Some of these numbers jump considerably when you add hike-in terrain: Aspen Highlands leaps from 3,635 feet to 4,352, and Telluride gains 635 feet to top out at 4,425. That’s cool if you’re into exercise and stuff. But I’m lazy and want the robots to do all the up so I can enjoy the down. Anyway, here’s the list:
Vertical is the only top-20 stats list in which anything outside of the West (Whiteface), makes an appearance. But the East sports some respectable vert overall – here’s the top 20:
And you know I’ll always represent the Midwest. A small part of my Michigan soul rebels at including Terry Peak, which feels more like a Rocky Mountain outlier than a Midwestern one, on this list, but I want to be consistent in my region classifications:
SKIABLE ACRES
Things get slightly more annoying when we step into the size category. Most ski areas in the West seem to just draw a big circle around their boundary and say, “have at it fells.” Which is like, nice story Bro, but I think I’ll not ski off that 600-foot cliff band. I understand the instinct, however, as you generally can ski most unmarked areas of most western ski areas for most of the winter. And the size top 20 is all West:
These numbers include Deer Valley’s anticipated 2025-26 post-expansion footprint. The Pow Mow number is for the public side of the ski area. Yeah it’s weird that I didn’t include the private side, but allowed Yellowstone and Wasatch on the list. Accounting for asterisks is a constant work in progress here.
Things are a little weird in the East. Killington, Smuggs, and Mad River count their acreage like western mountains, but just about everyone else counts trail acreage only. This partly reflects the reality that glades aren’t reliably live in the East outside of northern Vermont. That would be fine if Jay, Sugarbush, and Stowe – which all surely occupy a footprint similar to Smuggs – also counted everything within their borders (which they should). But, again, I’m going to go with the story they’re collectively spinning:
And here’s the Midwest. As with vert, this is the diciest entry on the skiable acreage list. Before the internet came along and forced them to consider such things, most Midwest ski areas were marketing to hyper-local skiers that didn’t really ask for or care about acreage stats. Most resorts would push their numbers of trails and lifts as bigness indicators. So we end up with a lot of, um, rounding in the Midwest acreage department:
AVERAGE ANNUAL SNOWFALL
Well this stat is the most fun, but also the most annoying. Check 10 online sources, and you will find 10 average annual snowfall stats for most of these mountains. I mean I get it – counting snow is hard. Different amounts fall on different parts of the mountain, the wind blows it all over creation, and it all gets eaten by Gnar Brah 120 Underfoot within the first 45 seconds of ropedrop. Oddly, this is the one category where ski areas in the West seem to round down. Surely Grand Targhee, Brighton, Solitude, Snowbird, Pomerelle, and Sugar Bowl don’t all average exactly 500 inches of snow per winter, and many aggregators peg each of them with higher totals. But I think it’s a case of “what gets the point across that we get a shit-ton of snow without having to actually count it?” And yeah 500 about does it:
Not so with the East, where many operators still act like carpenters from the 1830s, just sort of guessing “sure does look to be about about 12 inches there, Cyrus.” But the institutional exaggeration is engrained enough across the region that official numbers probably give us a good-enough general ordering of the region’s snowiest ski areas:
I don’t know about McCauley. They do get a shit-ton of snow in their perch off the Tug Hill Plateau, and I’ve taken some Utah-grade pow turns there, but I don’t think they’re raking that kind of pillow from the clouds. But, in general, this list gives us what we would expect: northern Vermont, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario snowbelt areas, and a few higher-altitude bumps saying, “clouds stop here and rest a while.”
The Midwest is, again, a bit round-y and a bit (perhaps) exaggerated. But this list is, again, exactly what we would expect: all lake effect outside of high-altitude Terry Peak, with the top nine mountains seated right in the Lake Superior bullseye and the balance slotted just off of Lakes Michigan and Erie:
I hope you enjoyed this based-on-a-true-story article. Hopefully a future version of it will fill in previously unknown details provided in a tell-all book by Stacie’s best friend Veronica.
I've seen charts like this before for the West and East, but never for the Midwest. I love it!
Sunday River #10 on vertical? No. I mean, technically, sure. But no. If ever there were a case of "lies, damn lies, and statistics," that's it.