Utah and US skier days

Ski Utah just released its skier visitations numbers and they show a slight decrease of 3.6 percent over last season, yet it’s the third-highest skier-visit total in state history and a 3.3 percent increase over Utah’s five-year average, according to the state’s trade association, Ski Utah. 

Our 15 alpine ski resorts recorded 6,503,635 skier visits during the 2024–25 winter season, the slight decrease coming mostly from a delayed start of the season with plenty of natural snow coming just after Christmas, and of course, the disastrous ski patrol strike at Park City Mountain, a resort that accounts for most than one quarter of the State’s skiers days. 

While the trend follows closely that of Colorado, it runs a bit counter-current with the nation that after enjoying a 2022/23 record year of 64.7 millions visits followed by a disappointing 60.4 last season, but bounced back to 61.5 skier-days this year. 

As always, I scratch my head and try my very best to guess who-did-what among our resorts, and while larger ski resorts have held their own because of their better snow-making and some expansion (Deer Valley), Park City Mountain and its terrible management paid the expected price and brought significantly down the total Park City’s three resorts combined (Deer Valley, Park City Mountain, Woodward) from 2,825,000 to 2,770,000, that is over 40% of the entire State!