65% of all ski resorts in the US have closed since 1960s (2022) | Hacker News Reader

65% of all ski resorts in the US have closed since 1960s (2022)

mdpi.com

I've always thought that there ought to be a way to create an investment fund specializing in East Coast ski resorts, Florida homeowners insurance, and other investments that are getting hammered by climate change, and advertise it on Fox News as being for investors who "are smart enough to know that climate change is fake" or something like that.

Unfortunately it would probably be illegal, as it seems like a textbook example of pump and dump.

Unrelated, the comments here bring up a good point - ski resorts have been supersized since the 60s, just like grocery stores and fast food portion sizes, so even though the loss of skiing is real, the number of resorts may be a lousy metric for it.

> Unfortunately it would probably be illegal, as it seems like a textbook example of pump and dump.

Why? You are not withholding information. In a pump and dump you do (you withhold telling them you want to sell early)

> In addition, at the time of research, there are five states (Alabama, Maryland, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas) and two provinces (Northwest Territories and Prince Edward Island) with only 1 resort remaining. Details of state/province/territory data can be seen in Table 2.

The time of the research appears to be 2022. They only found one in Maryland? There's more...

This data doesn't seem accurate, or they have a weird way of classifying resorts, or something.

update Ok I misremembered. I got some of the states mixed up. Maryland may only have one, but Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia have several.

Posting from the perspective of an American East Coast skier:

An interesting question is whether what is happening is loss or consolidation? In other words, while there are fewer ski resorts in the US, is the total size of the remaining resorts larger or smaller?

A quick look at skimap.org [0] shows both a lot of closed resorts, and archived maps from the open resorts that show that a few decades ago they were much smaller, both in terms of lifts and trails.

Unfortunately, a reliable measurement of ski area capacity is hard to come by. Even if we only look at the US (so ignore the fact that European resorts measure their terrain in km of piste while North American ones use skiable acres), the figures they quote can be inflated. The ideal figure to use is comfortable carrying capacity [1] but this is a trade secret. Possibly one could use total lift uphill capacity (or an estimate based on the lift type)?

There are a few factors driving the death of small local ski resorts. I think this is a bad thing and endangers the future of the sport by raising the barrier in terms of cost and travel for new skiers to try it, at the same time as mega passes make skiing cheaper than it has ever been for people who ski a lot. But it's not just climate change (the article touches on this).

One issue is the necessity and cost of snowmaking. Climate change has something to do with this (resorts that could open on all-natural snow now can't) but the real issue is that once one resort installed snowmaking, its rivals had to do so or go out of business. The Christmas vacation week is the biggest money maker for ski resorts, but skiing on the East Coast on natural snow at Christmas has never been reliable south of about Killington. The first season Okemo operated (without snowmaking), they didn't have enough snow to open to the general public until February.

Another issue is insurance. The court case of Sunday v. Stratton in the 1970s dramatically raised resort's insurance premiums and forced them to spend more money on trail maintenance, replacing the old narrow CCC-style trails with today's wide "boulevards". (A novice skier tripped over a bush at the edge of a beginner trail, hit his head on a rock and became paralyzed. He sued the resort and won).

Finally, there's better roads and more reliable cars. This means that skiers might be willing to travel further to a better mountain rather than ski at their small local hill. The closure of Braddock Heights ski area on the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland, coincides almost exactly with US-15 being upgraded to a four lane highway, making it much quicker for skiers from Frederick to drive to the larger Liberty resort in Pennsylvania.

Taken together, there are a lot of reasons why smaller ski areas have closed. Some are climate related, others not.

[0]https://skimap.org/regions/view/187

[1]https://www.saminfo.com/archives/2020-2029/2024/may-2024/the...

> Sunday v. Stratton

Could state law mitigate this? In essence, someone can certify themselves as an expert and thus waive liability for the resort? (I assume this would also void one's life insurance policy.)

When I was a kid we would go skiing in Colorado and there were big signs near most of the major lifts describing the Colorado Ski Safety Act:

https://donaldsonlaw.com/recreational-accident-attorney-denv...

The signs at Breckenridge have mostly been taken down, as I recall. But the Act still exists.

Many states[0] have explored this. IIRC, the New Mexico legislature once, back in the 1980s, helpfully defined alpine skiing as a "hyper-dangerous" activity, trying to place all liability on the skier, but a reference eludes my google-fu. [0] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/pa-supreme-court/1528129.h...

While lift ticket prices have maybe doubled in the last 20 years, I am sure costs For the ski areas have more than doubled, like You said insurance, but also parts, labour,

There is also the issue of the massive migration to the Sunbelt. Once you have to take a plane to ski you shrink the market significantly.

Where I am in Washington has seen massive population growth and the ski resorts have not kept up, but I have not heard anything about new ski areas opening in the state.

That's another problem, particularly out West (but also in Vermont). Most ski resorts operate at least partly on public land such as national forests. The relevant land management agencies, particularly the Forest Service, have been extremely slow/reluctant to grant the permits for new ski resorts to operate, or for existing ones to expand.

All of that might be true, but I feel like the experience of skiing has gotten really bad in the last couple years. The passes have become more expensive, the hills are a lot more crowded, you can find no parking even if you are there at opening time, and so on. It is becoming less of something to look forward to, and more like dealing with lines at Disneyland.

Is this the "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded" argument?

the pass structures now overwhelmingly favor return trippers vs. day passes. So it's very possible that there are fewer people going significantly more often.

i haven't skiied in a while and I went on a trip with regular skiiers to Whistler, and while I knew that skiing had gone expensive and Whistler is a top-tier resort, the lift tickets were $350 due to dynamic pricing for lifts that close at 3pm. If you ski at the same collection of resorts a few times a year the passes make more sense, but day tripping is eye-wateringly expensive now. The $20-50 lift ticket is increasingly rare.

Consolidation would kill it for me. I know that Wisconsin isn't exactly a ski mecca, but I live about 35 minutes away from a dinky little ski hill. I loved to just hop in my car after work, and ski for a couple of hours, then go home to my own food, and my own bed.

On the other hand, my family took an obligatory ski vacation in Colorado, and while the experience was stunning in every respect, it required planning, travel, vacation time, lodging, and so forth. And I'm not a great skier.

Unfortunately, the warmer winters are killing the nearby slopes.

My buddy and I have talked about this for decades, done the math.

They're simply not profitable anymore. Too much seasonal skilled labor, too much making snow, etc.

The cost of living is going to kill leisure for a large portion of the working class.

Not just leisure, but simple rights of life. Not good.

It's called "Baumol's cost disease".

Rising wages due to higher productivity are great for wage earners. Productivity growth isn't uniform though. A 2025 automated factory produces much more goods per worker than a 1925 factory. A 2025 barber doesn't cut hair much faster than a 1925 barber though. But wages tend to rise for the entire economy.

So as productivity increases, labor for any sector that doesn't scale is going to become relatively more expensive. Ski resort labor doesn't scale. It's a first world problem.

This is interesting.

"In addition, at the time of research, there are five states (Alabama, Maryland, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas) and two provinces (Northwest Territories and Prince Edward Island) with only 1 resort remaining. Details of state/province/territory data can be seen in Table 2."

I found it hard to believe that Texas has a ski resort. I did some searching and I can't find any evidence that this is true.

RI and Alabama both have one. Seems easy enough to check.

I imagine "resort" is doing heavy lifting.

Apparently the one in Alabama opened for the first time in 5 years recently.

https://www.skimag.com/news/alabama-cloudmont-ski-resort-ope...

I wonder how much of this is just the fact that main ski resorts started when the 10th came home from WW2.

Those guys ended up founding alot of these resorts. Areas in the backcountry, where the land was super cheap and they managed to get leases for them for pennies.

Over time they became more commercial and less of a personal project. Plus these areas became more valuable because of the skiing and that priced out the locals, the people that actually worked the slopes.

I think this story is way more complex then to point to climate change.

Mt Aggie, a synthetic ski slope is the only one in Texas I know of.

31% have closed in Canada in the same period

Actual title: Ski Resort Closures and Opportunities for Sustainability in North America

Also >65% of people in the US are overweight.

Even if ski resorts followed every sustainable practice stringently it wouldn’t change much, wouldn’t it? It’s not like ski resorts are the drivers of climate change, or even that climate change is really what causes ski resorts to close.

This is a weird paper. Optimizing sustainability won't save your resort.

A few other commenters are complaining about lack of snow (climate change), but the real drivers are fundamentals (e.g. cost of leasing protected forests or grooming) and trends like younger generations wanting ski weekends over ski weeks. If you can't stay relevant, you perish.

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