It’s no secret that Utah had a historic ski season. Alta, Brighton, Deer Valley Snowbird, Solitude, and numerous others saw record snowfall totals. This record snowfall helped Utah record its biggest visitation total ever.
The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Ski Utah recorded an estimated 7.1 million skier visitations for the 2022-23 season. This is up 22% from the 21-22 season, which was their previous record. These numbers aren’t official yet, as Snowbird will likely add to that count when it reopens for Father’s Day Weekend. Skier visitation means that if you make skied ten days at Utah ski resorts, each one of them counts toward the overall total. Ski Utah is still trying to figure out the metrics for determining unique visitors.
Nathan Rafferty, who is the President of Ski Utah, described how powder mania helped increase skier totals:
“Years like this, you see people around town and they’re just kind of exhausted because they’re looking at the snow report and they’re still thinking it could all end tomorrow: ‘We’ve gotta get it while you can.’ That’s one of the things I love most about skiing is the conditions change day to day and you never know when it’s going to turn off. So it’s that scramble to get the best skiing, and it’s what makes it fun.
The bottom line is that our biggest driver of visitation here — we can be great marketers, have great services at the resorts, all these different things — but at the end of the day, snow drives visitation, especially in Utah. There’s nothing scientific about it…It turns out people like skiing deep powder, and we had deep powder this year.”
In addition, many Utah ski resorts had their longest seasons ever. The resorts that had their longest season included Brian Head, Brighton, Deer Valley, Nordic Valley, Snowbasin, Solitude, and Woodward Park City.
Brian Schnee and Chase Thomason over at KUTV News Utah broke down the numbers, which you can watch below.
images from skiutahyeti Facebook
This article was originally published by Unofficialnetworks.com. Read the original article here.
