A ski area is three thousand feet of vertical, and the question that decides a day — is it snowing at the base or only up top, and where is the line tonight — is a question about the whole column. The industry answers it with one point, or with three fixed ones. This site starts by measuring the mountain: 415 named lift-served areas, base and summit taken from the lowest and highest lift terminal, cut into 1314 five-hundred-foot bands each carrying its own area, slope, aspect and precipitation climatology.
Base and summit are lift terminals, read off the AWS terrain tiles under all 4,183 lower-48 lifts — not a box around a centroid, which is how a day lodge and an avalanche training area end up ranked among the biggest mountains in the country. Against published resort specifications the median error is about fifty feet.
| Resort | St | Base ft | Summit ft | Vertical ft | Lifts | Lift km | Footprint ac | NDJFM mm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aspen Snowmass | CO | 8,114 | 12,534 | 4,420 | 16 | 27.0 | 5,542 | 419 |
| Big Sky Resort | MT | 6,822 | 11,134 | 4,312 | 32 | 32.7 | 8,645 | 363 |
| Jackson Hole Mountain Resort | WY | 6,318 | 10,395 | 4,077 | 14 | 16.3 | 1,520 | 592 |
| Beaver Creek | CO | 7,424 | 11,433 | 4,009 | 18 | 28.9 | 6,711 | 304 |
| Silver Mountain Resort | ID | 2,286 | 6,243 | 3,957 | 6 | 9.1 | 1,057 | 688 |
| Telluride Ski Area | CO | 8,743 | 12,499 | 3,756 | 17 | 20.6 | 3,336 | 334 |
| Wasatch Peaks Ranch | UT | 5,829 | 9,490 | 3,661 | 4 | 4.9 | 1,756 | 587 |
| Timberline Lodge Ski Area | OR | 4,841 | 8,486 | 3,645 | 7 | 9.8 | 716 | 1,891 |
| Steamboat Ski Resort | CO | 6,902 | 10,529 | 3,627 | 18 | 25.5 | 3,142 | 472 |
| Aspen Highlands | CO | 8,073 | 11,575 | 3,502 | 6 | 9.4 | 995 | 317 |
| Vail | CO | 8,047 | 11,549 | 3,502 | 27 | 40.3 | 8,592 | 438 |
| Sun Valley - Bald Mountain | ID | 5,756 | 9,123 | 3,367 | 11 | 15.9 | 2,344 | 413 |
| Aspen Mountain | CO | 7,957 | 11,258 | 3,301 | 5 | 8.6 | 969 | 308 |
| Heavenly Mountain Resort | CA | 6,643 | 9,940 | 3,297 | 19 | 18.6 | 3,865 | 623 |
| Breckenridge | CO | 9,553 | 12,827 | 3,274 | 25 | 33.8 | 3,775 | 287 |
| Park City Mountain Resort | UT | 6,741 | 9,980 | 3,239 | 37 | 47.2 | 11,318 | 431 |
| Mt. Bachelor | OR | 5,706 | 8,939 | 3,233 | 12 | 15.7 | 2,242 | 1,457 |
| Snowbird | UT | 7,750 | 10,957 | 3,207 | 11 | 14.0 | 1,518 | 748 |
| Whiteface Mountain Ski Center | NY | 1,204 | 4,350 | 3,146 | 9 | 11.8 | 834 | 475 |
| Taos Ski Valley | NM | 9,343 | 12,467 | 3,124 | 10 | 7.6 | 965 | 390 |
| Deer Valley Resort | UT | 6,465 | 9,560 | 3,095 | 32 | 34.9 | 5,772 | 407 |
| Killington Resort | VT | 1,160 | 4,167 | 3,007 | 20 | 22.4 | 3,070 | 588 |
| Keystone | CO | 9,294 | 12,274 | 2,980 | 13 | 20.9 | 3,860 | 236 |
| Snowbasin Resort | UT | 6,398 | 9,317 | 2,919 | 10 | 17.4 | 1,685 | 651 |
| Mammoth Mountain | CA | 8,070 | 10,986 | 2,916 | 26 | 27.3 | 2,936 | 836 |
| Winter Park Resort | CO | 9,079 | 11,987 | 2,908 | 20 | 24.0 | 2,962 | 321 |
| Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort | OR | 4,527 | 7,314 | 2,787 | 11 | 12.6 | 1,257 | 1,870 |
| Sugarloaf | ME | 1,396 | 4,181 | 2,785 | 14 | 15.3 | 1,608 | 614 |
| Tamarack Resort | ID | 4,893 | 7,647 | 2,754 | 6 | 6.4 | 1,425 | 619 |
| Crested Butte Mountain Resort | CO | 9,135 | 11,887 | 2,752 | 12 | 11.8 | 1,808 | 355 |
| Yellowstone Club | MT | 7,194 | 9,855 | 2,661 | 14 | 17.8 | 5,345 | 329 |
| Copper Mountain | CO | 9,718 | 12,333 | 2,615 | 19 | 21.6 | 3,177 | 348 |
| Bridger Bowl | MT | 6,109 | 8,698 | 2,589 | 9 | 8.6 | 1,275 | 462 |
| Crystal Mountain | WA | 4,381 | 6,953 | 2,572 | 10 | 10.7 | 1,546 | 1,457 |
| June Mountain | CA | 7,567 | 10,120 | 2,553 | 6 | 7.0 | 646 | 426 |
| Smugglers' Notch Resort | VT | 1,079 | 3,623 | 2,544 | 7 | 8.7 | 1,081 | 648 |
| Sugarbush Resort | VT | 1,510 | 4,048 | 2,538 | 16 | 18.7 | 3,242 | 587 |
| Montana Snowbowl | MT | 5,001 | 7,520 | 2,519 | 5 | 5.2 | 858 | 636 |
| Gore Mountain | NY | 1,056 | 3,548 | 2,492 | 12 | 13.3 | 2,002 | 507 |
| Discovery Ski Area | MT | 5,721 | 8,155 | 2,434 | 7 | 8.4 | 1,475 | 228 |
| Schweitzer Mountain Resort | ID | 3,990 | 6,387 | 2,397 | 9 | 9.9 | 1,934 | 810 |
| Arizona Snowbowl | AZ | 9,161 | 11,523 | 2,362 | 5 | 5.6 | 327 | 558 |
| Stowe Mountain Resort | VT | 1,296 | 3,652 | 2,356 | 10 | 13.1 | 2,186 | 669 |
| Sunday River | ME | 804 | 3,131 | 2,327 | 11 | 11.7 | 2,625 | 511 |
| Red Lodge Mountain | MT | 7,086 | 9,378 | 2,292 | 7 | 6.6 | 794 | 221 |
| Palisades Tahoe Olympic Valley | CA | 6,204 | 8,492 | 2,288 | 24 | 26.0 | 5,027 | 1,164 |
| Northstar at Tahoe Resort | CA | 6,326 | 8,608 | 2,282 | 14 | 17.2 | 2,264 | 1,051 |
| Whitefish Mountain Resort | MT | 4,485 | 6,766 | 2,281 | 14 | 14.2 | 1,932 | 655 |
| Grand Targhee Resort | WY | 7,586 | 9,867 | 2,281 | 5 | 5.9 | 1,076 | 631 |
| Sierra-at-Tahoe Ski Resort | CA | 6,634 | 8,839 | 2,205 | 6 | 6.0 | 759 | 1,233 |
Every state, and all 415 ski areas →
An aerialway is the one object in OpenStreetMap whose two ends are, by construction, the bottom and the top of ground somebody rides. Reading the terrain under every lift in the Lower 48 and taking each area's lowest and highest terminal reproduces published verticals to a median ~50 ft.
Measured on 432 paired SNOTEL stations over DJF 2025–26 — 37,582 station-pair-days — the winter mean is 3.33 K/km, and the summit is warmer than the base on 22.5% of days. No other constant rescues it.
PRISM's 800 m normals give the shape a model cannot resolve, as the NWS's own Mountain Mapper does for analysis. The window must be the model's effective resolution (~6–7Δx), not its grid.