Skiing by the numbers

Unlike yoga, many sports are fond of numbers; skiing is one of them. Obviously the sport starts with one pair of boards if you ski, just one if you ride. Their length, measured in centimeters, has vastly changed over the years; if today a men's giant slalom ski has shrunk to 191 cm, it used to be 215 cm forty years ago. The same holds true for snowboards and the only element that hasn't been going down is the cost of the daily lift ticket. Today it's around $90 at some the best US ski resorts, vs. less than $40 in Europe and $5 in... Iran! The total number of lifts a resort may offer varies a lot too. Great areas offer between 15 and 40 lifts, not counting Alpine interconnected resorts that boast a network of over 200 lifts.

In America, we tend to measure resorts by their skiable acreage while in Europe it's more linear and expressed in kilometers of ski runs! Altitude can be a big deal too, especially in the Alps, where at about 6,000 feet, good snow is almost always guaranteed. In the Americas, where resorts base elevation range from 2,000 to 9,000 feet, elevation doesn't seem to be such a big deal. If all these numbers are making you dizzy, remember that in the Rocky Mountains, lots of ski town residents see the number of ski-days in a season as a badge of honor. There's even a general contractor in Park City that has vanity license plates that proudly displays his “100DAYS” annual skiing goal!