U.S. Ski Area Consolidation: A Timeline

Fighting the robots one newsletter at a time

Sometimes I imagine what writing this newsletter would look like in an entirely analogue world. Like let’s say the internet just stopped working tomorrow. I would first off acquire a room of studious title. A mere office would not due. It must be a study, or perhaps a den, paneled in heavy woods and ornamented with stags’ heads. I would purchase a typewriter and learn to smoke. At six o’ clock each evening, I’d announce that I am not to be disturbed, unless Archibald should come by with my new cribbage deck. I’d then shut myself in with only the hounds to keep me company, pour a three-fingered whisky, and set to work on next month’s edition of The SnoSportSkiing News. My shelves, lined with a vast reference library of topographical maps, regional ski guides, and statistical tables, would be my only connection to the world beyond this room.

I kind of wouldn’t mind if the internet just disappeared into a wormhole. But I realize this is not practical. First of all, my monthly postage bill to mail this newsletter would be ridiculous. Second, looking for things in the real world is a pain in the ass. Yesterday, I went searching through my papers for an essay I wrote on skiing back, as my 8-year-old says, “in the 1900s.” It took an hour. Not bad, I suppose, for a 29-year-old piece of paper that I’ve moved at least 15 times and four states away from its origin, but still not as easy as asking the robots to look up a Storm article I wrote in 2023.

The robots though are still kinda dumb. Paper, at least, is sure of itself. The robots produce 317 million possible answers, none of which are whole, some of which provide some part of what you need, and most of which are irrelevant. For example, a timeline of when every extant U.S.-based multi-mountain ski area operator purchased each of their ski areas. This is something I need kind of a lot, but which doesn’t exist. So I made it exist so that the next person who searches for it will find this chart, color-coded by operator:

If you’re reading this in the future, you might find a better version of this graphic here. Source data also lives there.

Like everything with The Storm, this is a start. It only includes active operators, so defunct companies such as Peak Resorts (purchased by Vail in 2019), and Intrawest (absorbed by Alterra in 2017), are not included. The timeline excludes a few multimountain companies whose acquisition timelines are elusive, including six-resort owner Wisconsin Resorts. It doesn’t include acquisitions that have since been disposed of, such as Powdr’s purchase of Killington or Boyne’s pickup of Crystal Mountain, Washington. At some point, I will add all of those things. For now, I’m just happy to have a chronological list, in order, of how our ski companies grew into the current versions of themselves.