We’ve Refined the Way We Measure Skiable Acres. Some Resorts See Size Score Changes.
The below changes come as part of a series of Mountain Score recalibrations implemented today. To see the full list of adjustments, click here.
Our size category weights each resort by total acreage, and historically, we’ve used resort-sourced acreage numbers in our measurements. However, we haven’t been offering completely fair comparisons by sticking exclusively to those numbers. Some resorts measure their acreage by total footprint, which doesn’t always comprise entirely skiable terrain. Others measure their acreage by skiable terrain only, but don’t include parts of the resort that are technically in-bounds but not skiable. To remedy this issue, we employed an acreage calculator to determine the true skiable footprint within the bounds of each resort.
For nearly all Colorado and East Coast resorts, we determined the total boundary-to-boundary footprint to be larger than officially-released acreage numbers. All of these resorts have unskiable woods or natural features in between defined trails, and these have likely been excluded from the official numbers for obvious reasons. For most other Rockies resorts—where pretty much anything in-bounds is fair game—we determined total footprint numbers to generally align with claimed skiable acres.
For nearly all Tahoe resorts and Jackson Hole, we determined their total skiable footprint to be smaller than their claimed acreage number. We believe these mountains have been including some unskiable or inaccessible areas outside the presumed resort boundaries in their official calculations. While such information isn’t publicly available for every one of these resorts, master plans from Alpine Meadows and Kirkwood confirm that their official acreage numbers exceed their actual skiable footprint.
Going forward, we will be releasing both skiable acreage and total footprint numbers for each resort. Skiable acreage only includes terrain that’s skiable within the resort, and will now be used for all size score calculations. The total footprint measurement counts each area’s terrain from boundary to boundary, regardless of whether it’s skiable; this metric can be used to reference a resort’s raw physical presence. We’ve updated each mountain’s review page with these new acreage measurements. These changes resulted in slightly adjusted acreage numbers for Northstar and Kirkwood, and were large enough to result in size score drops for Alpine Meadows, Heavenly, Jackson Hole, Squaw Valley, and Sierra-at-Tahoe.
Due to the way we factor hike-to acreage into our lift scores, resorts that saw acreage drops with this measurement change were susceptible to a further deduction in the lifts category. In the end, only one resort ended up being affected: Alpine Meadows, which sees a substantially higher percentage of its footprint as hike-to terrain with this measurement change (while Alpine’s total skiable footprint was downgraded, we found our existing 530-acre hike-to measurement to be accurate). With this re-calibration, we’ve corrected Alpine’s hike-to footprint to comprise 33% if the resort’s footprint, rather than 22%. As a result, Alpine drops from a 7 to 6 in the lifts category. Squaw Valley, which comprises 16% hike-to terrain with corrected measurements, barely escaped a lift score drop by less than half a percentage point.
