We both love skiing, travel, and the excitement of exploring new ski resorts. We have our favorites that we ski year after year and probably have the best overall skiing experiences at those places, but the most fun tends to be when we are exploring a new area and score a huge powder day or find something really unique. There are still many places that we haven’t tried in North America that many would consider to be “must ski” places where we can look for some of that fun.

Explore the Rankings

Our Top 6 Resorts

Criteria

This is our list of what we think are the best 100 ski resorts in the United States and Canada. We identified a minimum set of criteria that each resort must meet to start the process.

• At least 1400′ vertical. We measure vertical drop as the largest continuously skiable vertical drop via ski lift. If you have to climb it doesn’t count. If you can’t ski from the highest point to the lowest without taking a lift, it doesn’t count.
• At least 250 acres of terrain. This tends to matter more for North-eastern areas because resorts in the Northeast have narrower trails and heavy trees, cutting down on acreage.
• We favor areas that get more than 250″ of snowfall but the lower limit is 120″ for Canada and far northern states. Once you get under 100″ of natural snowfall you are basically skiing entirely on groomed runs that have snowmaking. If it’s under 175″ of snowfall, it has to be really far north or it’s not going to be consistently good, so southwestern states have a higher minimum.
• At least 2 ski “pods”, or areas served by distinct lifts. No “one-lift covers the whole mountain” places unless it is really unique (La Grave, France comes to mind with a 6000′ vertical rise lift).
• Has to have some challenging terrain. Skiing is an adventure and for us we need some steep stuff to get the blood pumping. Trail ratings are not consistent across different resorts, so a lot of research was done by reading reviews and watching Youtube videos of people skiing down the most challenging runs at each candidate resort. Resorts like Okemo and Stratton were taken off the list for this reason. If an intermediate skier can ski the double-black terrain it’s not on the list.

Narrowing it down…

After qualifying resorts based on stats, we poured over trail maps and resort reviews to cut the list down to a more manageable 100 resorts. There are over 600 resorts in North America, so that was not easy. Most of the places we chose were somewhat known to us already from reading articles in the ski mags or talking to people on the mountain. In the end, this list is what we think are the best, but not everyone will agree.