Revenge of the East: Vermont Nearly Tied With Utah in Skier Visits During the 2025-26 Season

For years, the narrative in American skiing has run one direction: the West is where the real snow, the real scale, and the real bragging rights live, while the East gets by on grit, ice, and shorter lift lines. But the newest regional breakdown from the Kottke End of Season Report shows that this old adage took a serious hit in the 2025-26 season. Of the six regions the report tracks — Rocky Mountain, Northeast, Pacific Southwest, Midwest, Southeast, and Pacific Northwest — only two gained skier visits in 2025-26. Both of them were in the East. Remarkably, Green Mountain State Vermont nearly tied for skier visits with Greatest-Snow-on-Earth State Utah.

• Related: Comparing Ski Regions: The Upside-Down Winter of 2025-26

The Kottke report, released in partnership with the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) in late August, is the ski industry’s most detailed annual look at skier visits, drawing on 40 years of historical data and operational figures submitted directly by ski areas across the country. The NSAA reported preliminary numbers in May 2026 which saw skier visits fall from 61.6 million in 2024-25 to just over 53 million in 2025-26 — an 8.5 million drop. The Rocky Mountain region, the nation’s largest by visit volume, absorbed the worst of it: 20.2 million visits, down more than 6.3 million (-23.8%) from 26.5 million the season before. The Pacific Northwest fared even worse by percentage, falling 35% and losing 1.6 million visits.

Meanwhile, the Northeast added 746,077 visits (+6%) to reach 13.3 million, the largest gain of any region in raw numbers. The Southeast posted the biggest percentage increase in the country, up 8.3% with an additional 370,000 visits. While the West was shedding visits by the millions, the East was quietly building.

• Related: 2025-26 Season Skier Visits Fall by 9 Million — Here is How the East Saved it

The Kottke report breaks down the regions more detailed by state. Colorado still led the nation overall with 10.5 million visits, followed by California (5 million). But nowhere is the East-West swing more vivid than in the state-level comparison of Utah and Vermont.

Utah is “The Greatest Snow on Earth” — home to Park City, Deer Valley, Alta, and Snowbird, a bucket-list, fly-to destination built around big mountains and famously dry powder. Vermont is beloved and steeped in ski racing heritage, but it’s generally seen as a regional, drive-to market, not a place typically mentioned in the same breath as Utah in terms of scale. Yet the two states finished the season almost dead even: Utah logged 4.7 million skier visits, Vermont just behind at 4.6 million. A state built around some of the most famous, highest-elevation terrain in North America landed within 100,000 visits of a state a fraction of its size.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey, grouped together in the report to protect the confidentiality of states with fewer than three ski areas, posted the strongest percentage growth in the country at +11.2%, climbing from 2.6 million to 2.9 million visits.

Oregon suffered the steepest decline of any state, down 44% from 1.9 million to just 1.1 million visits.

The report’s average-visits-per-ski-area figure tells the same story from a different angle: the national average fell from 125,300 to 108,980 visits per area, with the steepest per-area declines concentrated almost entirely in the West — Utah (-83,622), Oregon (-69,637), California (-61,986), and Colorado (-56,926) all posted the biggest drops. One state bucked the pattern in an interesting way: Vermont’s visits per ski area actually fell by 13,604 despite the state’s overall visits growing 9.2%. The explanation is straightforward — Vermont grew from 26 to 31 operating ski areas over that span, spreading a growing pool of visits across more mountains.

What this year’s full Kottke state breakdown makes clear is just how divergent the season actually was: a Rocky Mountain region down nearly a quarter, a Pacific Northwest down more than a third, set against a Northeast and Southeast that both grew. Utah and Vermont landing within 100,000 visits of each other isn’t a coincidence so much as a symptom — when the West’s marquee destinations struggle this badly, even a modest regional market can end up standing shoulder to shoulder with one of the biggest names in skiing.

Whether that gap closes again next season may depend heavily on the snow. A strong El Niño pattern is already being discussed heading into 2026-27, and if it delivers for the Rockies and Pacific Northwest the way it sometimes has in the past, this season’s numbers could look like an anomaly rather than a new normal. If it doesn’t, the East’s revenge tour might not be over yet.