Well, there is one thing I do with data, put it in spreadsheets. So what did I find? What the busiest ski areas in Colorado are using math (I am smort).
So how did I do that? Well when ski areas release master plans, they usually release the number of skier days from the past few years, or how many tickets they sell/passes are redeemed. Using that, skiable acres, and average number of open days, I found the average number of skiers per acre per day at most (not all) ski areas in Colorado. Some areas don’t release annual skier days, so those were not included in this list.
Without further ado, the top five busiest ski areas in Colorado and the average skiers per acre per day (or s/a/d):
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Echo Mountain, 4.49 s/a/d
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Breckenridge, 3.29 s/a/d
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Beaver Creek, 3.23 s/a/d
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Aspen Mountain, 3.21 s/a/d
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Buttermilk, 2.84 s/a/d
On the other end of the spectrum, the five least busy ski areas in Colorado are:
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Powderhorn, 0.45 s/a/d
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Wolf Creek, 0.76 s/a/d
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Loveland, 0.81 s/a/d
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Arapahoe Basin, 1.08 s/a/d
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Sunlight, 1.20 s/a/d
Now, this data is flawed. This isn’t the end-all-be-all for busyness. Aspen Mountain, for example, is high on the list due to the small acreage (less than 700 acres), but there are a ton of trails fit into that small footprint. On the other hand, Powderhorn has a massive skiable acreage (1600 acres) for the number of trails. According to skiresort.info, Ajax has over 100 km of trails while Powderhorn has less than 40 km.
Here is the graph for all the ski areas with a full set of data.
images from Ski Town All-Stars & bryanfino13