How this site works
PowderPicker is a stat sheet for 28 ski resorts across 7 countries and 3 continents, with day tickets running from $63 to $356. It exists because resort websites are built to sell you a trip, not to let you compare one mountain against another. The vertical drop is on a marketing page, the terrain split is buried in a trail map PDF, and the ticket price is behind a booking widget that wants your dates first. Here it is all in one table.
Where the numbers come from
Vertical drop, base and summit elevation, lift and run counts, terrain percentages, and season dates come from what each resort publishes on its own stats pages and trail maps. These are the resort's own figures. Nobody independently surveys a mountain, so where a resort is generous with itself — counting a beginner carpet as a lift, or measuring vertical from a summit that is rarely open — that generosity carries through to this site.
Why skiable area is not one number
North America measures resorts in skiable acres, counting everything inside the boundary including trees and bowls. Europe and Japan measure kilometres of marked piste, counting only the groomed runs themselves. These describe genuinely different things and there is no honest conversion between them, so this site never invents one. 21 resorts here report acres and 7 report piste kilometres, and each is shown in its own unit. Comparing a 5,000-acre figure to a 200 km figure tells you almost nothing.
Snowfall, prices, and passes
Annual snowfall is the resort's reported long-run average, usually taken at a mid-mountain or summit stake. It is the most flattering statistic in skiing and should be read as a rough band, not a forecast. Lift ticket figures are peak-season walk-up rates in US dollars: with dynamic pricing almost nobody pays exactly that, and booking weeks ahead is routinely far cheaper. Epic and Ikon affiliations get renegotiated between seasons, so confirm a resort is still on your pass before you buy anything.
Where the opinions come from
The pros and cons on each resort page are distilled from public skier discussion — Reddit threads, regional ski forums, and trip reports — not from our own visits. We have not skied all 28 of these mountains, there is no test team, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. When skiers repeatedly say a resort's high alpine shuts on wind holds, or that the base village empties by six, that makes the list. Condensing thousands of comments into a handful of bullets is editorial judgment, and it will sometimes be wrong.
About the score
The number beside each resort is our own composite, weighing terrain variety, snow record, lift infrastructure, and what a day actually costs. It is a subjective editorial score, not an average of visitor reviews and not a survey result. Because it is ours rather than collected from the public, it is deliberately kept out of this site's structured data — publishing an in-house number as review markup would be dishonest to search engines and to you. Use it to sort; use the stats to decide.
What this site does not do
No resort pays to appear here, to rank higher, or to have a con removed. There are no sponsored placements and no booking relationships influencing the order. The stats were last checked on July 15, 2026. Ski resorts change lifts, prices, and pass affiliations constantly, so if something here is out of date, it is a data bug worth reporting rather than an advertisement.