4.8
Billions of dollars of economic activity generated on average each year in the state of Colorado thanks to the sports of skiing and snowboarding.
2,200
Approximate number of ski patrollers working the slopes in Colorado.
480
Average number of inches of natural snowfall each season at Wolf Creek Ski Area, the most in the state.
42,676
Number of skiable acres in the 25 ski areas in Colorado. Need more? Get ready to earn your turns. It would be pretty difficult to measure how much backcountry access there is… let’s just go with lots. You probably couldn’t ski it all if you tried.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000
Approximate number of water molecules that compose the typical snowflake. This variance plus the fact that they all form a little differently depending on the temperature, humidity, water vapor, and other factors they encounter on their journey to the ground, means that the chance that no snowflake is the same is great, though not impossible.
16
Number of hours driven by Lindsey Vonn and her family from her childhood hometown in Minnesota to Vail when she got started in skiing as a kid.
26,411,680
Total vertical feet reported on the Epic Mix profile of Charles A. since 2011. His biggest season was 2011-12 with 7,508,982 vertical feet skied.
4
Snow avalanche caused fatalities in Colorado for the 2015-16 season. Only one more than the season before but a remarkable trend considering years prior to that back to 2009 have killed 7 to 11 people per year. Be smart in the backcountry.
27
The recorded number of glacial quakes, a type of earthquake created by rapid glacial melting, caused by Helheim, the fastest retreating glacier in Greenland, between 1993 and 2005.
300
The rough number of days of sunshine in Colorado which coincidentally also matches the average number of inches of snowfall annually across the state.
837.5
Greatest snowfall recorded in Colorado, at Wolf Creek Pass in 1978-79. Oh, to have partied in the back in the 1970s.
158.424
Miles per hour. The speed Italy’s Ivan Origone hit on skis last March, making him not only the world speed skiing record holder but the fastest non-motorized human ever. Valentina Greggio, also of Italy, set the woman’s record on the same day at 153.502
2
Number of people to ski all of Colorado’s peaks over 14,000 feet in elevation in a calendar year. Chris Davenport became the first and fastest to do it in 2007 in 362 days. Jon Kedrowski, who holds the record for sleeping on top of all the Fourteeners, joined him last June, finishing in exactly 364 days.
2017-2018
Season when Vail Resort’s Epic Pass will work at British Columbia’s Whistler Blackcomb Resort, which the Colorado-based company acquired this past summer (see page 50).
