Mountains do not measure themselves the same way
PowderPicker is a stat sheet for 28 ski resorts across 7 countries and 3 continents, with day tickets running from $75 to $374. 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.
Vertical, lifts, and the resort's own arithmetic
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.
What skiers say about a mountain
The pros and cons on each resort page are distilled from public skier discussion — trip reports written the week they were skied, and season-long argument among people who ride these mountains — 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.
Why there is no score
Resorts here carry no star score. A single number would have to weigh steeps against groomers and snowfall against ticket price, and the right weighting depends on who is skiing. Next to stats that come from the resorts themselves it would also read like a review average, which it would not be. Sort by the measured fields instead: vertical drop (the default), snowfall, or ticket price.
No resort pays to appear here
Two people put this table together around other jobs. There is no office, no travel desk and nobody drawing a wage from it, and nothing here books a trip for you — no resort and no pass operator pays to appear, to rank higher, or to have a complaint taken down. Where a resort publishes no figure for a field, that field is left empty rather than filled in from a neighbouring mountain, which is why some rows on the table are short. Lifts, prices and pass affiliations change every close season, so a figure that has gone stale is a gap in our maintenance rather than an advertisement.