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 first in a series of articles summarizing those findings.
Beaver Creek’s peak-day walk-up lift ticket is set to hit $392 during the 2026-27 ski season. Right behind is Vail Mountain ($374), Park City ($369), Deer Valley ($349), Steamboat ($344), and Breckenridge ($332).
Complaints are useless. Not because the frustration is invalid, but because our indignance has been made useless through over-saturation. And I don’t mean social-media pile-ons. Complaints about the cost of lift-served skiing, it turns out, are as old as lift-served skiing itself.
In November 1966, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs held hearings on a potential ski resort development in California’s San Gorgonio Wilderness Area. The proceedings included a statement by a Mr. Sylvester Heinberg, identified as an athletic coach and director at San Bernardino Valley College, who stated, in part:
I think I am in a very fine financial position, I am very happy in my position, but I know that I cannot afford for four members of my family a $ 6 ski ticket or to go to Mammoth when my friends tell me that the ski lift ticket there is going up to $7 this year; that would be $28 for a weekend just for the ski lifts alone. If I could, I may make it just once or twice a year, but this does not represent, in my judgment family recreation at these prices for the majority of the southern California people.