Give Me Space!
It’s a growing complaint among longtime skiers that the slopes are more crowded than they used to be. With average annual skier numbers staying fairly static, it’s difficult to know if that’s really the case, or just a perception, but certainly, skiers in Europe’s most famous resorts have been noticing that even in the once quiet weeks of early January, runs can be crowded. It’s these larger resorts where skier visit numbers do keep creeping up, while less well-known, lower-lying centres with less reliable snow cover struggle for business.
In North America, where there are generally quieter ski resorts, they limit skier numbers at peak times during the COVID pandemic years, in order to guarantee social distancing. Now they’ve kept this practice on at some top resorts to prevent overcrowding and coincidentally encourage skiers to buy season passes early to ensure they can actually get on the slopes when they want to.
There are also ever more apps now that can provide live info on where the crowds are, so you can head for quieter slopes, as long as not everyone does the same thing as you anyway.
The closest we’ve come to a full scientific measure of which ski areas, on average, get the least number of skiers on their slopes comes from the German ski writer and cartographer Chris Schrahe, who has looked at detailed measurements of ski area sizes and compared these with numbers of lift tickets sold and uplift capacity of lift systems, even going so far as meticulously measuring ski area dimensions using Google Earth rather than taking official stats at face value.
In an edition of his detailed analysis of the world’s 100 largest ski areas, last published several years ago now, Chris points to the Swiss resort Obersaxen as the least visited in Europe on average, with 1,280 visits through the season per kilometre of slopes.
It’s not an area many Brits know well, perhaps part of why it’s so quiet, but there are 120 km of slopes here, 17 lifts, and a healthy 1,110 m of vertical. It’s located about 50 miles south of Zurich as the crow flies, although double that by road or rail, on the way up to better-known Andermatt.
In North America, Chris highlights Big Sky, one of the continent’s largest ski areas, as having plenty of space on its slopes normally, with an average of 1,918 skier visits per kilometre, and notes America’s largest resort, Park City, does pretty well too with 3,283 skier visits per kilometre of slopes.
Big Sky has long been aware just how much space its fabulous slopes offer and has used the fact for marketing.
“On average, we offer more than an acre per skier. There are times when I’m skiing at Big Sky and don’t see another person for the entire length of the trail – something I try to never take for granted!” says the resort’s PR Manager, Stacie Harris, adding, “And with our new chairlift investments, we’re able to move people quickly and efficiently around the mountain – which is why you’ll rarely wait in a lift queue.”
However, the ski slopes of Alberta and British Columbia, away from the biggest names, also score highly with BC’s Panorama, topping Chris’s annual report for several years running with the most space per skier.
Quieter Ski Resorts in Europe
Back in Europe, new ski awards launched by ski resort comparison website Snomad this autumn saw Sainte-Foy-Tarentaise win in the “Best Ski Resort for Quiet Slopes” category.
For those not in the know, Sainte-Foy sits on the Italian border between The Paradiski area of Les Arcs and La Plagne on one side and Tignes/Val d’Isère on the other. Its own ski area is modest by comparison to these giants but is famously quiet by comparison, with a bonus of lower lift pass prices than most.
Whatever the averages and the awards say though, you can still usually find space on the slopes if you plan carefully. That can mean avoiding famous resorts, except at the very start (pre-Christmas) or end (late March/April outside the Easter holidays) of the season. Another study calculated 74% of ski visits worldwide are generated by only 13% of ski resorts. Perhaps opt for one of the thousands of less well-known mid-sized destinations instead?
© Images Big Sky
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