The Future of Small Ski Areas: Challenges Ahead
Small community ski areas across the U.S. are closing at an accelerating rate, victims of rising insurance costs, aging infrastructure, and climate variability. From Hickory Ski Center in New York to Hesperus in Colorado, these local hills where generations learned to ski on rope tows and modest chairlifts are disappearing. The loss isn’t just nostalgic. These areas created the pipeline of future skiers, offering affordable, accessible entry points to the sport. As they close, that pipeline constricts, and the big resorts can’t replace what’s being lost.
The rope tow at Buffalo Mountain had a mechanical groan you felt in your chest before you heard it. Three ropes total, dragging kids and their parents up a hill in Algonquin, Illinois that couldn’t have been more than one hundred vertical feet. This was 1980, maybe ’81. I was seven and the rope burned through my mittens if I held on too tight, which I always did.
By 1982 I’d graduated to Holiday Park in Volo, IL. It had four rope tows and a chairlift. The chairlift changed everything, not because it was faster but because riding it made you feel like you’d arrived somewhere.
Both hills are gone now. Buffalo Mountain closed in the early ’90s, though the property would later reopen briefly as Raging Buffalo Snowboard Park. Holiday Park became townhomes. The names remain on the developments, which is either thoughtful or cruel depending on whether you remember what used to be there.
I thought about those hills the other day when Hickory Ski Center, up near Warrensburg, NY in the Adirondacks, announced it won’t open this winter. After reopening for 2023-24 following nearly a decade of dormancy, Hickory said it has “no plans to operate this season” while new management figures out what comes next. The mountain closed public access. Construction is planned for the base lodge. The language is all future tense and careful optimism, which in the ski business usually means someone’s trying to raise money and figure out if the math works.
The Arithmetic Problem
Two years ago, Hickory needed $38,000 by mid-December just to pay liability insurance. Not infrastructure. Not snowmaking. Not payroll. Just the cost of being allowed to operate. The Indy Pass, Unofficial Networks, and a company called Entabeni stepped in with funding. The lifts spun. It felt like a save.
But here’s what $38,000 buys at a small ski area with 17 trails, four lifts, and 1,200 feet of vertical: one season. Maybe. Hickory is owned by 300 stockholders, many of them descendants of the 10th Mountain Division veterans who founded the place in 1946. Multiple families, multiple generations, all watching the same spreadsheet wondering if loving something is enough to keep it solvent.
It generally isn’t…
The List Grows
Over the past two years, small ski areas have closed in that quiet way things disappear when nobody’s watching.
Four Seasons Golf & Ski Center in Fayetteville, New York closed for good in November after more than 60 years. Owner John Goodfellow listed it for $2.5 million. A buyer emerged, but not one who planned to keep it as a ski area. Eventually everything was for sale. Oak Mountain bought the magic carpet lift and hauled it away.
Hesperus Ski Area in Colorado hasn’t opened since 2022-23. A mechanical breakdown required a $200,000 gearbox replacement. The area is owned by Mountain Capital Partners, which also runs Purgatory and Nordic Valley. When you’re managing a portfolio, the small ones with small profits and expensive problems wait.
Cockaigne Ski Resort in Cherry Creek, New York hasn’t operated since October 2023. The 462-acre property with 15 trails and three lifts was listed for $3.5 million. It originally closed in 2011 after fire destroyed its base lodge. New owners purchased it in 2017, invested heavily, and reopened for 2020-21. Then came COVID, followed by a mild winter in 2022-23. Eventually they stopped trying.
The Numbers
According to The Storm Skiing Journal, the 2024-25 season saw 12 ski areas reopen after closures, but five areas that had operated the previous year did not open. Eight areas remained closed for their second consecutive winter. The total count hovers around 501 operating ski areas in the United States.
The reasons follow patterns. A 2022 study in the journal Land identified increased insurance costs, loan defaults, changing market structure, limited snowmaking, and inconsistent weather as primary factors. From 2000-2019, the average U.S. ski season shortened by 5-7 days, expected to double or triple by 2050. Machine-made snow, once assisting 41% of Midwest and Northeast ski areas, now helps 89% nationwide. But snowmaking requires water, energy, cold temperatures, and capital.
The business model that worked when Hans Winbauer and other 10th Mountain Division veterans built Hickory in 1946 doesn’t pencil out anymore. What replaced it is consolidation. Vail Resorts. Alterra Mountain Company. Multi-mountain passes. The arithmetic works at scale but fails at 100 vertical feet with a few rope tows.
The Pipeline
There’s a theory in the ski industry, rarely stated but widely understood: small hills create skiers, and big resorts convert them into customers. The local hill with the rope tow and the $25 lift ticket is where you learn the fundamentals. The learning curve is gentle because the hill is gentle.
Then you get better and you want more. Steeper terrain. Longer runs. You migrate to bigger areas. By the time you’re booking flights to Colorado, you’re deep in the funnel that, for me at least, started with those three rope tows in Algonquin, IL.
But what happens when that first rung disappears?
Wilmot Mountain, where I spent most of my high school weekends, is still operating under Vail ownership. Corporate ownership apparently provides the scale to survive where independent operations fold. But Wilmot’s an outlier. Many small hills in the region are gone. Families who might have driven twenty minutes to try skiing now face longer drives, higher costs, and the calculation of whether it’s worth the investment.
The math gets harder when the entry point moves further away and costs more. Skiing becomes something you plan and budget for rather than something you try on a random Saturday. The pool of potential future skiers shrinks.
Small hills created that moment efficiently and cheaply. Most operated on thin margins and volunteer labor and the assumption that next winter would be cold enough to justify opening again. When insurance doubles or a gearbox fails or three warm winters stack up, those assumptions collapse.
New Management
The phrase “new management model” appears frequently in closure announcements. Sometimes it means finding investors. Sometimes it means shifting to summer operations. Sometimes it means the current owners are exhausted and hoping someone with fresh energy will see possibilities they’ve missed.
Rarely, it means resurrection. Snowland Ski Area in Fairview, Utah closed in 1980 after rapid increases in insurance costs and permitting issues killed what had been a popular regional hill with a couple of surface lifts. Wasatch Academy took over the land for private use. But this November, the Utah Division of Outdoor Recreation awarded Snowland a $1.46 million grant to purchase a new surface lift and expand its historic Nelson Lodge. The nonprofit Snowland Foundation plans to open two rope tows to the public this winter with free lift tickets, aiming to operate about twenty days. Tickets will eventually cost money, but are expected to remain affordable. Snowbird is providing electrical work and donating a snowcat. The goal is to become a year-round recreational hub by 2027-28.
It’s the exception that proves the rule: saving a small ski area requires public money, nonprofit structure, community support, and institutional backing. Even then, it starts with two rope tows and twenty operating days.
Hickory’s announcement referenced “new beginnings” and construction on the base lodge. That could mean expansion. It could also mean making the place more marketable for sale. Sue Catana, Hickory’s general manager and daughter of founder Hans Winbauer, thanked everyone “for being part of the Hickory story,” the kind of gratitude that reads either as optimistic or elegiac depending on what happens next.
John Goodfellow expressed the same hope when listing Four Seasons: that someone would preserve its legacy. But hope and market reality rarely share the same spreadsheet. The buyer wanted the land for something else. The equipment got sold piece by piece. The legend became real estate.
What Gets Lost
When a small ski area closes, you lose more than vertical feet. You lose the Friday night race leagues. You lose the volunteer ski patrol. You lose the base lodge where hot chocolate costs a dollar.
You lose community anchors. These places employed local teenagers and provided winter recreation in towns that didn’t have much else.
My relationship with skiing started at Buffalo Mountain, progressed through Holiday Park, and led to thousands of ski days across the West. Take away those first two hills and I’m probably not a skier. I’m someone who tried it once at a big resort, decided it was too expensive, and never went back. Multiply that by thousands of kids who won’t have their local hill.
The Season That Isn’t
Hickory won’t open this winter. Neither will Four Seasons, permanently. Hesperus enters its third straight year of closure. Cockaigne remains for sale. Some areas do reopen. Community fundraising occasionally works. But the trend favors consolidation and closure, not resurrection.
Somewhere in Upstate New York right now, a kid who was planning to learn at Hickory is learning they’ll have to drive farther and pay more. Maybe they’ll go anyway. Maybe the parents will decide it’s not worth it. Maybe that kid would have loved skiing for life, and maybe they won’t get the chance to find out.
Nobody rings a bell when a small ski area closes. There’s no ceremony for the last chair. The announcement comes via Facebook, usually apologetic, sometimes optimistic. Then winter arrives and the hill stays dark. The snow falls on slopes nobody’s grooming. The lifts don’t spin. And somewhere a kid who might have become a skier never gets their first ride up a rope tow that opens a door they’d love for the rest of their life.
That door is closing, hill by hill, season by season. And nobody’s quite sure how to stop it.
