(Update) OnTheSnow Shutting Down For Good At Some Point

A screenshot of onthesnow.com on July 11, just two days before the site is set to shut down.

UPDATE 7/14/2020 7:26pm EDT: Onthesnow.com is still online for now, and the language about July 13th as the shutdown date has been removed. We’ve reached out to Vail Resorts for comment.

Late Friday evening, Vail-owned Mountain News Corporation announced that it would be shutting down OnTheSnow and other affiliated websites effective July 13, 2020. In a statement, the media outlet said it was no longer financially viable to continue operating the sites. The outlet says they will “explore the possibility of selling, partnering, or contributing assets to another media outlet if there is an opportunity to allow for a consistent or enhanced online experience.”

Our Take

These are very trying times for the ski industry, and it seems that OnTheSnow won’t able to weather them. Vail Resorts lost a major chunk of revenue last season due to North American COVID-19 shutdowns, and is on track to lose even more through the next several weeks due to similar suspensions just announced in Australia.

OnTheSnow provided a lot of great information on previous annual snowfall numbers as well as crowd-sourced ratings on mountains. Hopefully, Mountain News Corporation can cut a deal to continue producing at least some of their content through another news outlet.

Thankfully for us, PeakRankings is financially stable (we’re not currently dependent on revenue to operate) and won’t be shutting down any time soon. We hope consumers can find some of the mountain information they’ve previously looked to OnTheSnow for on our site. We also hope to build out a few features consumers will lose with this shutdown, such as historical weather data and snowfall totals, in the coming months.

All in all, however, it hurts to see a ski media outlet go under. In our view, any disappearance of public resort information is a loss for the consumer.