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, wh

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 https://skimap.org/regions/view/187 [1]https://www.saminfo.com/archives/2020-2029/2024/may-2024/the-question-of-capacity https://www.saminfo.com/archives/2020-2029/2024/may-2024/the...