Colorado Ski Season 2024–25: A Deep Dive into Safety, Legal Battles & Mountaintop Trends

Kelly Geraghty on July 21, 2025

Colorado’s 2024–25 ski season was defined by record crowds, sobering accidents, high‑stakes litigation, and mounting public scrutiny of the state’s mountain operators. As resorts and roadways struggled under the pressure of ever‑increasing skier volume, safety advocates and lawyers questioned whether the industry is keeping pace.

Key Takeaways

  • Fatalities while skiing and boarding dipped slightly to 13, but Colorado’s death rate remains nearly double the national average.
  • Slope-related injuries remain underreported, though trauma centers saw high volumes of serious cases.
  • Ski traffic hit record highs, with 13.8 million visits and severe I-70 congestion on peak days.
  • Epic and Ikon passes continue to shape crowd patterns, with Epic resorts facing more backlash.
  • The Colorado Supreme Court ruling weakened blanket waivers, increasing resort liability exposure.
  • Lift safety failures, like the Zendo chair incident, are now central to ongoing litigation.
  • Guest frustration is rising, prompting public apologies, new reservation systems, and possible legislative action around lap-bar use.
  • Climate variability and crowd control clashed, as resorts struggled to balance access and terrain safety.

A Snapshot of Safety on the Slopes

Lives Lost, But Slightly Fewer Than Last Year

At least 13 fatalities—8 skiers and 5 snowboarders, aged 20 to 76—occurred at Colorado ski areas during the 2024–25 season. Most incidents happened on groomed intermediate terrain during high-speed crashes or collisions. Additionally, two individuals suffered fatal heart attacks, and another suffocated after tumbling into deep snow.

While tragic, this death toll was an improvement on the 15 deaths recorded in the 2023–24 season, and well below the 22 fatalities in 2011–12, Colorado’s deadliest season on record. However, the state’s rate—about 1 death per million skier visits—remains nearly double the national average of roughly 0.58 per million.

Hidden Harm: Non-Fatal Injuries

Resort operators typically do not publish detailed injury statistics. Still, trauma centers across Summit, Eagle, and Pitkin counties treated hundreds—likely thousands—of accident victims, including broken bones, ACL tears, and concussions. Notably, Summit County saw at least three snowboarders die days after crash-related injuries—a stark reminder that not all ski injuries turn fatal immediately.

A Mountain of Skier Visits—and Gridlock

Waiting in Lines—and Cars

The 2024–25 season drew about 13.8 million skier visits—tied for Colorado’s third-busiest season ever. On the national stage, U.S. resorts recorded 61.5 million visits, the second-highest total in American history. It’s official: the post‑COVID “bump” in skiing has become the new normal.

Colorado’s scenic mountain highways couldn’t keep up. During the Christmas holiday and President’s Day weekend, parking lots filled by 9 AM, and I‑70 traffic snarled for miles. CDOT tracked over 6,000 vehicles per hour through the Eisenhower Tunnel, prompting tunnel metering and multi-hour delays.

Epic vs. Ikon: The Pass That Keeps on Giving—and Crowding

The explosion of multi-mountain season passes—notably the Epic and Ikon programs—now accounts for nearly half of ski visits nationwide. Vail Resorts estimates 75% of its skier days stem from pre-purchased passes. With five Epic-affiliated Colorado mountains drawing roughly 40–45% of statewide visits, it’s clear the pass system is reshaping resort traffic.

Ikon resorts like Winter Park and Steamboat also drew massive attendance, but innovative capacity limits at A-Basin (combined with overnight parking reservations) offered an intriguing counterbalance.

Measures to Mitigate Congestion

Resorts and agencies tried numerous strategies:

  • Snowstang buses and the Winter Park Express train offered alternatives to car commutes.
  • Snow traction laws were enforced more strictly, reducing highway incidents.
  • Paid parking tiers at key resorts incentivized carpooling and early arrival.
  • A-Basin’s successful parking reservation system effectively curbed highway spillover.

These fixes partially reduced congestion but fell short on peak holiday demands, prompting questions about long-term capacity management.

The Legal Powder Keg: Liability on the Rise

A Landmark Legal Ruling

May 2024 marked a turning point: the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that standard resort waivers cannot shield operators from all negligence claims, especially when they breach specific safety statutes like the Ski Safety Act or Tramway Safety Act. This decision allowed an incapacitated girl’s lawsuit—originally dismissed due to a waiver—to continue, setting a precedent that resorts must be more accountable for their operational negligence.

Lift Safety Under Scrutiny

Just months later, a wrongful death suit was filed against Vail Resorts after John Perucco allegedly fell 25 feet from Breckenridge’s Zendo chairlift due to icy seating. The suit claims resort staff failed to:

  1. Clear snow and ice from the chair,
  2. Lower the safety bar,
  3. Notify the proper authorities within two hours.

This case may press the Supreme Court’s waiver ruling into real-world impact as it moves toward trial.

Broader Legal Themes

Other pressure points included:

  • Avalanche‑related liability: In California, legal action was taken against Heavenly for allowing access in hazardous conditions, highlighting ski patrol’s role in guest safety.
  • The Park City ski patrol strike, outside Colorado, underscored how labor disputes can seriously disrupt operations and expose liability vulnerabilities.
  • A DOJ antitrust review of Alterra’s Arapahoe Basin acquisition ended without penalties, yet it flagged growing regulatory concern over market concentration.
  • Class actions involving passholder refunds and environmental threats to resort expansions continued to expand the legal spotlight on industry practices.

Public Sentiment & Public Relations Hazards

Overcrowding Provokes Backlash

Locals and long-time skiers grew vocal about their frustration. Former Congressman Mary Bono complained that “Epic Pass…oh my God, those crowds. Epic lines,” citing safety concerns as slopes filled well past comfort levels. Similarly, posts featuring towering lift lines at Vail Chair 5, and clogged ski highway scenes circulated widely, driving national media attention.

Epic vs. Ikon in the Court of Public Opinion

Epic resorts frequently bore the brunt of criticism for overcrowding and staffing challenges. In contrast, Ikon-aligned resorts, with access caps and reservation policies (e.g., A-Basin, Steamboat), attracted less ire and, at times, praise.

Industry Apologies and Initiatives

Vail Resorts’ COO, Beth Howard, issued public apologies after chaotic early-season lines, promising improvements in lift flow and guest experience. A-Basin’s leadership, meanwhile, doubled down on messaging that limited access was the only way to preserve “The Legend’s soul”.

Safety Bar Debate Sparked by Tragedy

The December 2024 death of Donovan Romero at Keystone, after riding with the lap safety bar up, has spurred legislative interest in making bar usage mandatory. Currently, Colorado leaves lap-bar usage voluntary despite some claims and advocacy for a national move to “buckle up” on lifts.

Climate, Snow, Risk, and Pressure

The unpredictable snow cycle of 2024/25 put resorts between a rock and a hard place: open terrain early to alleviate crowd pressure and risk exposing hazards, or delay opening and risk concentrating guests. Although no serious incidents occurred, some guests questioned whether crowd-control trumped caution—a debate continuing into the offseason.

What Colorado Can Learn—and What Lies Ahead

Safety remains a shared responsibility: Fatalities dipped slightly, but severe injuries continue to occur. With limited data, resorts rely heavily on internal policies and capacity rules, yet high‑risk incidents still happen.

Legal accountability is increasing: The Supreme Court’s waiver ruling and the Breckenridge lawsuit emphasize that negligence—especially in regulatory breaches—will face greater scrutiny. Resorts are likely reevaluating waivers and revising operational protocols.

Crowding is a persistent challenge: Snow lovers flocked to Colorado like never before, but car queues on I‑70 and lift bottlenecks eroded goodwill. The epic/Ikon paradigm has created both accessibility and friction, and local pressure to balance growth with experience.

Public pressure is prompting change: Visibly frustrated skiers, bold media coverage, and guest-driven movements (like the lap-bar campaign) are pushing resorts to act. How far they go in addressing concerns may define guest loyalty and legal exposure in the coming years.

Striking the right balance: Colorado’s mountains remain a cherished playground. The 2024–25 season showed the potential and the pressure that come with growth. For the industry to thrive, it must reconcile popular demand with robust safety, legal resilience, and guest satisfaction. Those who get it right may help define what the next era of skiing looks like.

Final Takeaway

The 2024–25 Colorado ski season was remarkable, flourishing in popularity, but also revealing cracks in infrastructure, safety, and legal armor. As we head toward 2025–26, keep an eye on capacity controls, lap-bar regulation, and operator liability. The mountain demands responsibility, and those who manage it best will lead the terrain.

Waivers don’t shield ski resorts that violate state law from liability, Colorado Supreme Court rules Miller v. Crested Butte, LLC

Kelly Geraghty on August 7, 2024

The pages of fine print that skiers and snowboarders must agree to when hitting the slopes in Colorado — waivers of liability — do not protect ski resorts when resorts violate state laws or regulations, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The ruling, handed down in the case of a 16-year-old girl who fell from a ski lift at Crested Butte Mountain Resort and was paralyzed two years ago, likely ends a years-long push by the ski industry to use waivers to shield resorts against almost all lawsuits, even in cases where ski areas violated state law, experts said.

“It’s a sea change, in terms of ski areas’ responsibilities and consumers’ ability to be protected from ski areas’ negligence,” said Evan Banker, a personal injury attorney at Denver firm Chalat Hatten & Banker. “…From a consumer protection standpoint, it’s huge. Because liability breeds responsibility.”

In their 5-2 decision, the Colorado Supreme Court justices considered a lawsuit brought by Annie Miller and her father, Michael Miller, over Annie’s 30-foot fall from a lift at Crested Butte, which is owned by Vail Resorts. The father and daughter from Oklahoma boarded the Paradise Express chairlift, a four-seat, high-speed lift at the resort, on March 16, 2022.

Annie couldn’t get properly seated, and grabbed the chairlift to keep from falling. Her father and others began to yell for the lift to be stopped as she was dragged forward, but the lift continued with Annie hanging from the chair and her father trying to pull her back to safety.

Eventually, Annie fell and landed on her back. Even then, the lift did not stop, and Michael Miller was forced to ride to the top and ski down to his daughter, who suffered severe injuries and was paralyzed after the fall.

Michael Miller brought a negligence lawsuit against Crested Butte, arguing that the resort employees should have stopped the lift well before Annie fell and that failing to do so violated Colorado’s Ski Safety Act and the Passenger Tramway Safety Act. A lower court ruled much of Miller’s claim was invalid, and he appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court.

Monday’s ruling partially reversed the lower-court decision and allows Miller to continue to pursue the negligence lawsuit against the resort.

Sara Huey, a spokeswoman for Vail Resorts, declined to comment on the ruling because the Millers’ lawsuit is ongoing. In court filings, attorneys for Vail Resorts argued that the lawsuit misstated the precedent in Colorado around private liability waivers, which skiers and snowboarders must agree to when buying lift tickets and passes.

“Colorado courts have upheld private recreational waiver agreements, even where the plaintiff could have (or did) point to a statute regulating the activity,” attorney Michael Hofmann wrote. “The existence of recreational safety regulation has never been enough to prohibit private parties from agreeing that a waiver defense will be available.”

“Big victory for ski safety”

More broadly, the state high court’s decision likely ends efforts by the ski industry to expand the protections that waivers of liability give ski areas.

“This was a big victory for ski safety in Colorado,” said Bruce Braley, who represented the Millers. “It says unequivocally that ski areas cannot force skiers and snowboarders to sign away their rights to protection under the statutes and regulations that govern the ski industry in Colorado.”

The ruling turns back the clock on liability in some Colorado ski accident cases, Banker said.

“For many, many years… everyone sort of agreed that when you sign that waiver you are waiving claims of negligence, but you can always still make claims if the ski area fails to do the things it is required to by law, like maintaining the lift properly,” Banker said.

But since about 2017, the ski industry has been successfully challenging that understanding through targeted litigation, winning key court cases that strengthened the protection afforded by waivers and pushing to essentially provide complete immunity for anything that could happen at a ski resort unless there was gross negligence, Banker and Braley said.

“So what this has done is change that,” Banker said. “It brings us back to the landscape everyone understood it to be many years ago. Which is, you can waive claims of negligence, but the ski area doesn’t get to avoid its legal responsibility, its responsibility in statute and regulations, by having you sign a waiver.”

Adrienne Saia Isaac, a spokeswoman for the National Ski Areas Association, a Lakewood nonprofit that represents more than 300 sk- area members, said it is “too early to tell how the ruling will affect the Colorado ski industry.”

The association argued in court filings both that the lift operator at Crested Butte was not required to stop the lift in response to Annie Miller’s mishap, and that liability waivers do not allow ski areas to get around statutory regulations.

“While chairlift accidents within the reasonable control of ski area operators will never be eliminated, they are rare,” wrote Brian Birenbach, an attorney in Breckenridge representing the National Ski Areas Association. “This will not change by the continued enforcement of liability waivers in the courts.”

Source:  SHELLY BRADBURY | sbradbury@denverpost.com | The Denver Post

Article: Liability waivers don’t shield Colorado ski resorts that violate law (denverpost.com)