Trip Report
Winter Park Report from February 2025
One of the most common storylines seen across North America in today’s continually expanding ski scene is the overcrowding and overpricing of mountain towns. Jackson Hole, Aspen, Lake Tahoe, Park City, Telluride, Stowe. These incredible ski resorts offer visitors a tremendous ski experience, but they have struggled in recent years to support the communities that make them float. For many, this is one of the biggest grievances with today’s ski industry, and no one has yet to find a complete solution to this rapidly expanding issue.
So far, the ‘solution,’ or way locals with rapidly shifting costs of living have adapted, is by moving further from the original mountain community, or in select cases, having employee-subsidised housing offered by ski resorts. These answers are more responses to changing times and are not ideal for locals or ski resorts. But is this just the cost of growth and doing business, or is there a way to find balance and sustainability in a local community when a ski resort has ambitions to continue growing?
Winter Park, Colorado, thinks it can be different, and may be the best bet to challenge the status quo.
Winter Park Quick Facts & History
- Date Opened: 1939
- Multi-Destination Pass: Ikon Pass
- Number of Trails: 166
- Skiable Acres: 3,081
- Vertical Drop: 3,060′
- Base Elevation: 9,000′
- Summit Elevation: 11,220′
- Average Annual Snowfall: 345″
- Terrain Breakdown:
- Beginner: 23%
- Intermediate: 50%
- Advanced: 21%
- Expert: 29%
- Number of Lifts: 28
- Night Skiing: No
- Ownership: City of Denver (operated by Alterra)
- Other Activities:
- Snow Tubing
- Snowshoeing
- Snow Biking
- Snow Cat Tours
Terrain Like I Have Never Seen
Winter Park’s numbers on paper don’t really do the resort justice. While Winter Park only has 166 marked trails, almost all terrain within the resort’s boundaries is fair game to explore. Most of the time, this comes in the form of gladed terrain at a varying degree of difficulty. Whether you are looking for more mellow, unmarked glades off of Wild Spur (a seemingly overlooked area of the resort), steep, consistent fall-line glades off of Eagle Wind or Mary Jane, or extra hairy but often untouched glades off the Prospector Express. These seemingly endless options give a whole other layer of Winter Park to discover, which, as an Ice Coast skier whose home mountain forbids tree skiing of any kind, is something that is greatly appreciated.
Adding to the fun of exploring the unmarked trees throughout the resort is the odd hut phenomenon at Winter Park. On my first day visiting the resort, I was riding up the old-school Challenger Double with a local who informed me that various people had taken the initiative to construct makeshift huts hidden away in secret spots across the resort. He claimed to have heard of over 40 of them existing, and over the course of five days skiing deep into the trees, I ran across four myself.
If glades aren’t your thing, don’t let the previous message scare you off. Winter Park’s Mary Jane area offers enough moguls to exhaust even the best skiers and riders on the mountain, while wide open groomers such as Cranmer offer long sections of corduroy for any ability level to rip.
Winter Park is one of the biggest ski resorts in Colorado, while being the most easily accessible resort of its size from Denver. While there are still tons of locals on the mountain, these factors make Winter Park primarily cater to day-trippers from Denver and less destination-focused on out-of-state travelers from across North America. This unique mix of visitors curates the iconic culture on the Mary Jane side of the resort, with tailgates in the parking lot, and just a chill, relaxed vibe void of stuck-up locals who would look down upon me as an out-of-state visitor.
Winter Park’s X Factor
Hands down, the most underrated aspect of Winter Park is something the I-70 resorts have loathed as a solution to seemingly all of their problems–a train. The Winter Park Express train service, revived in 2017 after an eight-year hiatus, brings visitors from Denver’s Union Station to literally 100 feet from the slopes. Ski trains, a once popular means of transportation to ski resorts across North America, have all but died off, except in Winter Park, where the service has actually been growing in recent years.
While the majority of skiers and riders still commute to Winter Park via car, the train offers enormous potential for the future of this resort, leading the way in a mixed-use transportation model that allows for increased capacity, decreased congestion, and a more environmentally sustainable transit model. This train route, paired with a potential aerial transit connection to the town of Winter Park, would only bolster the selling point of such a service, elevating Winter Park to a resort that reflects a more European approach to integrating resort, community, and out-of-town visitation.
https://youtube.com/shorts/_aJ_oeo6Kao?feature=share
Winter Park’s Ambitious Future
On my last day of skiing in Colorado for the season, I experienced Winter Park’s busiest day on record. Almost 20,000 people showed up to the mountain.
Of course, there were lines, and of course, it was not the ideal day to be skiing, but I would have expected a lot worse for the busiest day of all time. If you knew where to go and didn’t hit the busiest spots on the mountain, lift lines could remain at a moderate 10-15 minutes most of the day. When you put things in perspective, knowing that any previous day, whether that be Christmas, MLK Weekend, or the deepest storm of the century, had fewer crowds than that random Saturday in February is quite impressive.
Although Winter Park is already the fifth biggest ski resort in the state, it has bigger aspirations. In its most recent Master Development Plan, Winter Park has drafted an ambitious proposal to fundamentally alter the resort as we know it today. The most notable ways they would do this are by adding over 400 acres of additional ski terrain to the looker’s right of the Wild Spur Express and connecting the resort directly to the town of Winter Park with an over two-mile-long gondola.
- Related: Winter Park Resort, CO, Offers Update on Masterplan That Includes Gondola Connecting Resort to Town
In an era of unaffordable housing, overcrowding, and displacement in countless mountain ski towns, Winter Park is walking the difficult tight rope that is balancing becoming one of the biggest ski resorts in the country while not destroying the ski town that bears the resort on its shoulders. While housing prices have undoubtedly increased around Winter Park in recent years (like almost every area in North America), it has not been nearly to the same extent as many ski towns we hear about today.
Adding a direct transit connection to the town of Winter Park would make it quicker for locals to get to the mountain without relying on existing buses that can often see lines at peak commuting times. At the same time, it would bring more distant communities of Fraser and Granby closer to the resort, incentivising fewer people to drive to the mountain while opening up additional parking options. For these reasons, the proposed gondola is not nearly as contentious as many other proposed infrastructure projects of this size at other ski resorts.
Regardless of what may be to come, Winter Park has already taken the opportunity to invest in employee housing, not in a nearby town or far away, but rather directly at the base of the resort.
While Winter Park may be Colorado’s oldest continually operating ski resort, its plans look just as bright as its rich history. If Alterra can implement its Master Development Plan without significant irreparable harm to the local community, it will be one of the most impressive examples of a major ski resort and community coexisting today. The plan’s focus on additional accommodations and transit makes that outcome realistic, and I am eager to see what Winter Park can pull off.
Winter Park Photos
For more information, check out Winter Park’s website.
