This Ski Resort Is the Most Popular Mountain Destination in the U.S. — and It Gets 300 Inches of Snow a Year

Colorado's Breckenridge Ski Resort is perfect for all ages.

Ski season is in full swing, with riders and skiers jetting off to resorts all over the world to hunt down power pockets on their favorite trails. But, if you’re a skier from the U.S., it turns out you don’t need to travel very far to find both spectacular snow conditions and trendy peaks.

The Family Vacation Guide released its annual Family Ski Index, which breaks down the most popular ski resorts in the U.S. for 2024. To create the index, the team created a seed list of 50 of the most popular resorts using articles from across sites like Time Out and more and took into account Google Keyword Planner data to see the total number of Google searches for the resort across the country between December 2022 and November 2023. The Google data was compared to the previous year’s numbers to evaluate an increase or decrease in searches. The research also took into account the number of Instagram mentions for each resort and the average annual snowfall of each destination. Finally, each resort was given a normalized score out of 10 to calculate the winners.

After calculating all the data, The Family Vacation Guide named Breckenridge, Colorado, its top spot, scoring an 8.7 out of 10.

“The Colorado resort is in the Rocky Mountains’s picturesque Tenmile Range. It is a large resort covering five mountains boasting 35 total ski lifts and 187 total runs today, growing exponentially since the resort opened in 1961,” the website shared about the resort. It noted that the resort has seen a massive surge in Google searches, up 198 percent year-over-year, and it ranked as the coldest resort in the study, averaging 19.67 degrees, making it a perfect place for fluffy snow.

It also happens to be a perfect place for family getaways. "What Breckenridge has always catered to and hit very, very well is the families,” Clark Rothey, a ski instructor with the resort for more than 30 years, previously shared with Travel + Leisure. “Things are just becoming more hip. It’s like, come and have a good time, whatever. We don't care if you're 50 years old or 22 years old. Come, and there's something for you to play with.”

Breckenridge is also an ideal place to plan a trip to later in the ski season, as Colorado actually hits its peak snowfall in March, with an average of 10 inches of snow falling throughout the month in the city of Denver alone. And you can expect plenty of it to fall on Breck too, as it sees a whopping 300 inches of snowfall a year.

Breckenridge wasn’t the only Colorado resort to make the list. Copper Mountain also came in at the No. 3 spot followed by Crested Butte at No. 5. Telluride, Vail, Beaver Creek, and Keystone swept the No. 7 to No. 10 spots, respectively. They were joined by Jackson Hole in Wyoming in second place, Whiteface in New York at No. 4, and Stowe in Vermont at No. 6, showing you can still find fantastic places to ski from coast to coast this year.

See all the results at thefamilyvacationguide.com. 

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