Alaskan Ski Resorts: Why Aren’t There More Of Them?

I’ve decided that I want to start this blog up again (I’m still paying for the domain, after all - might as well use it), but I’m going to switch it to being about geography, at least for the time being. Quite frankly, politics get pretty depressing after a while. 

Recently I saw a Reddit thread asking why Alaska had very few ski resorts. This was a question that fascinated me to no end, because for those of you who don’t know, I am an avid skier, having participated in the sport since I was 6 years old.

A topographical map of Alaska, taken from Earth@Home.

As you can see, the state is quite mountainous. In fact, it contains the highest peak in North America, Denali (which was named Mount McKinley until then-President Barack Obama restored the indigenous name for the mountain.) Fun fact, I actually have met someone who served as a Denali guide, though that’s a story for another time.

Not only does Alaska have a lot of mountains, it’s also got a lot of snow in the winter. Many of the mountains even have snow in the summer. Based on that, one would think the state is fertile ground for a ski resort. In fact, however, there are only 10 ski areas in Alaska with Wikipedia articles , a number that seems far too low for the largest state in the country by area. For frame of reference, Colorado, which has less than a sixth of Alaska’s area, has 35 notable ski areas. But as global warming threatens our beloved sport in Colorado, colder places that get more snow now will increasingly become more popular…right?

In other words, Alaska “should” have more than two hundred ski resorts if they were distributed evenly across the state. However, it doesn’t. So why not?

First of all, let’s consider one thing that won’t change no matter how much the climate warms: The length of the day. In my experience, most ski resorts I’ve been to close around 4 PM - that’s when the last skiers are allowed to get in line for the lift. Without totally doxxing myself, I live at about 42°N, and on the day I’m writing this (December 5, 2024), the sun rose at 6:59 AM and will set at 4:12 PM. That’s 9 hours, 13 minutes of daylight. During winter, the days are shorter; who woulda thunk? And crucially, the winter days get shorter the further north you go.

At 42 degrees north, the shortest day of the year is slightly over 9 hours long. However, in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, the sun doesn’t rise until almost 10 AM this time of year, and it sets just under six hours later. That’s just six hours of daylight, which may not be long enough to make a ski resort economically viable. And the further north you go in Alaska, the more limited the light will become. It just doesn’t make sense to run a ski resort that’s only open a few hours a day, and night skiing isn’t possible (or safe) everywhere.

Now look at this map. It’s from Wikipedia and shows Alaska highlighted in red. Given that, you can see just how far it is from the rest of the United States. The closest major U.S. airport to Alaska is Seattle/Tacoma (SEA), and even that flight from Seattle to Anchorage has a block time of 3 hours, 50 minutes. Ted Stevens International Airport (ANC) does maintain flights to some major cities in the American West, as well as Minneapolis-Saint Paul (MSP), but those are even longer than the one from Seattle. 

The only regularly scheduled international route to or from ANC, for now, is Frankfurt, Germany (FRA). This route is operated by German leisure airlines Condor and Discover Airlines; however, both are only seasonal. And that season is summer, which is not ski season, even in Alaska. I don’t know how many Europeans would want to visit Alaska anyway when Norway is a more politically stable (and perhaps more importantly, much closer) alternative. But with no direct flights during the winter, I’d imagine that’s a very limited market for ski tourists to the Last Frontier.

To put this into perspective, imagine that you live in Greater Boston, like me. If I want to go for a ski trip in the American West starting on January 20, I could either go to Denver in 5 hours or less for $250/ticket, or I could go to Anchorage and be there in 12 hours or more for $600/ticket. Yes, I looked it up; that’s the quickest way. Considering the limitations faced in terms of daylight, as well as the fact that things in Alaska are more expensive, most people in such a position will choose Colorado. And that’s doubly so for those in Europe, who have plenty of ski resorts in the Alps.

Aerial photo of Copper Mountain in Colorado showing how much infrastructure it takes to run a ski resort. Taken from Ski.com.

The last reason I’ll touch on is the cost. Not the cost borne by those who would ski at these hypothetical Alaskan resorts, but rather the cost borne by those who are going to build the resorts. 

A ski resort takes lots of time and money to set up. I’ve never been involved in the process of developing one, but I’d imagine that anyone who wants to would need to get environmental permits squared away. Who knows how much money that takes. And that’s before the lifts are built, which not only takes money, but also labor. Plus, most ski resorts in North America build “villages” at the base like the one pictured above - you need building permits (money), the salaries of people who staff the businesses (money), and upkeep (money).

As monetarily expensive as it may be to run a ski resort, labor is the real problem here. As my country has “learned” time and time again, you can throw as much money as you want at a problem, but if you don’t have enough people to work on a project, it will never be built. There’s a reason this country has a teacher shortage that is only likely to get worse.

At the time of writing, Alaska is the third-least populous U.S. state, with about 733,000 people in 2023. It is, by a factor of nearly five, the most thinly populated state relative to its geographic size, and that won’t change anytime soon. Employers in industries we might consider more essential than running a hypothetical future ski resort have already faced problems filling positions. They’ve turned to labor from outside the state. It sort of reminds me of how some young Australian adults work as ski instructors at resorts in Canada like Banff and Whistler. However, the sort of mass ski tourism some would envision in Alaska would require out-of-state labor (and sometimes out-of-country labor) on a far greater scale. 

In my opinion, if Alaska is going to gain a labor surplus sufficient to build new ski resorts (let alone dozens of them), the only thing that would really cause that is an increased AI boom. AI, of course, is problematic enough on its own - we’re already seeing these problems. Is it really worth training artificial intelligence to build ski resorts when there are more pressing issues to deal with?

All of the above being said, Alaska is a beautiful state that I believe is worth visiting if you can spare the effort and expense to get there. There are many types of nature tourism that can thrive there, but ski tourism likely isn’t one of them.