How to Make Skiing Affordable and More Fun

Gregory White, Reporter

Skiing is a sport for the rich. That’s probably what comes to mind when you think of skiing, or maybe you tried skiing but it didn’t go well. A lot of people have experiences like this, and decide to quit skiing. However for it to become enjoyable skiing takes lots of practice to get good, and if you don’t know how to save money, then it can be very expensive.  I think skiing is a great sport and here’s how to save money to make it even better.

Seasonal Rentals

Renting skis per one day can make sense if you plan on going for 1 day, but if you plan on going for more than 3 days a year it would become very expensive. Places like sun & ski rent out skis, boots, and poles for the season for around $150, compared to daily rental which can cost over $30 a day. If you were to ski 15 days a season that

 would be over $400, not to mention that with season rentals, you can use them whenever you want, for places that don’t rent skis or for your house when it’s snowing.

Where to Ski

If you aren’t going to fully use the mountain, then don’t go there, you don’t have to be able to ski the hardest double black diamond on the mountain, but don’t go to a mountain with a lift ticket that costs $120 just to use the bunny hill.

Lift Ticket Prices

Never pay full price for a lift ticket. You can find hundreds of websites online to buy tickets for a heavily discounted price like Liftopia. Just make sure that the website your buying from is safe. 

 Avoid Season Passes

As good of a deal as they might seem, they aren’t unless you are skiing a ton, maybe if you were to own a condo on the mountain or something. At Catamount an unlimited adult ski pass would cost $659.00, to break even on that compared to buying individual tickets, you would need to ski 22 days a season. That’s a lot.

Bring Your Own Food 

Mountain food is not only expensive, but it’s also pretty terrible. There are exceptions to this, I’ve been to mountains with amazing restaurants at reasonable prices, but that’s very rare. So do yourself a favor and bring food.