Just how bad was it?
Warm temps, weak snowpack drive second-largest skier drop in industry history
Snow guns go full blast under the Corona Lift at Eldora Ski Area on Jan. 11./ Photo by David Krause, The Colorado Sun
The winter that wasn’t wrecked visitation to U.S. ski areas, with 9 million fewer visits, marking the second largest annual decline in visitation in the history of the resort industry.
On May 5, the National Ski Areas Association announced preliminary surveys showing the nation’s nearly 500 ski areas hosted around 52.6 million skier visits, which is down nearly 15%, from 61.6 million visits in 2024-25 – the second highest on record.
The feast-to-famine collapse in skier visits ranks the 2025-26 season 32nd worst out of 48 seasons on record.
“Few seasons demonstrate as clearly as this one how dependent our industry remains on regional weather patterns,” NSAA President and CEO Michael Reitzell said in a statement that pointed to record warmth, rain and persistently weak snow at resorts out West.
Good snow out East helped numbers there, with resorts in the Northeast counting 12.9 million visits, compared with 12.5 million in 2024-25. In the Southeast, there were 4.8 million visits in 2025-26 compared with 4.4 million the previous season. Resorts in both regions posted their second-best season in the last decade.
But visits melted in the West as record-high temperatures ravaged snowpack. The NSAA numbers show 20.1 million visits in the organization’s Rocky Mountain region, the most trafficked in the country with more than 90 resorts in Colorado, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and New Mexico. That compares with 26.5 million in 2024-25, 26.8 million in 2023-24 and a record 27.9 million in 2022-23. Resorts in Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington hosted 8.9 million visits, compared with 12.3 million in 2024-25.
Annual resort snowfall tallies in the West were crushed as well. The average snowfall nationally in the 2025-26 season was 112 inches, down 33% from the 10-year average of 169 inches. Despite this, the number of days that resorts operated remained steady – around 110– revealing the strength and increasing reliance on snowmaking across the U.S.
Colorado will not release skier visitation numbers until next month. Last year, the state’s 26 ski areas reported 13.8 million visits, making the 2024-25 ski season the third busiest ever for the state. The 2021-25 seasons were the four busiest in Colorado history. The streak ended in 2025-26, with visits expected to fall below 11 million.
To keep reading visit the Colorado Sun here.