Comparing All Nationwide Ski Lift Pass Networks by Size

There are 5 major multi-resort multi-day ski passes sold in the US and Canada.

• EPIC: Owned by Vail Resorts, and was the first pass like this created (2008).
• IKON: Owned by Alterra, and was created in 2018 as a direct competitor to Epic.
• INDY: Created in 2019 to help independent ski resorts compete with the larger companies.
• Mountain Collective: Created in 2018 by the Aspen Skiing Company. Shares many of its resorts with the IKON network.
• Powder Alliance: This is a different type of pass network. The benefits come free when you purchase a full season pass at any of their associated resorts.

While there is more to a pass network than it’s associated resort’s combined size, we feel it is an important metric to consider if you are looking for the most value for your dollar. Use this as yet another piece of information (along with price, number of participating resorts, and difficulty level) when deciding which pass to purchase for the year.

How We Determined “The Largest”

Choosing the largest ski resorts is a bit of a tricky proposition. Do you look at just the summit elevation? How about the total acreage, most trails, or steepest vertical drop?

Well, we decided to combine all four of those metrics into one ranking to get the best idea, although we fully admit this is completely subjective.

In the datasets below, we don’t actually show our Bigness Score (Is that even a word? Didn’t think so…). Unlike our Difficulty Score, this one was too subjective to actually attach a hard score to. So we use it to rank each resort, and provide you the relevant details so that you can make your own decision.

Average Acreage, Trails & Elevations per Pass

To determine which ski pass network has the lineup that is (by average) the largest, we averaged all their associated resorts together. The Mountain Collective comes out as having the lineup that averages out as the largest of all nationwide pass systems. IKON comes in second, with the Powder Alliance third, and EPIC fourth. The INDY network brings up the rear with the lineup of resorts that are, when averaged all together, the smallest in size.

This list is ordered by our combined score as described above, and interestingly, it is the same exact order as our difficulty score as well. This means that the Mountain Collective pass has the resort lineup that is both the most difficult and the largest.

Rank	Pass Network	Summit	Vertical	Acres	Trails
#1	Mountain Collective	9418 ft	3310 ft	2815	137
#2	IKON	7870 ft	2584 ft	2092	116
#3	Powder Alliance	7812 ft	2140 ft	1522	66
#4	Epic	4885 ft	1620 ft	1306	73
#5	INDY	4302 ft	1145 ft	617	41
	All, Combined	5622 ft	1696 ft	1223	70

It may be jarring to see Epic so far down in this list, but they have a different business model than the others. Their Epic pass encompasses all of their Vail Resort-owned properties, no matter how good each one is. Most (if not all) of the other passes go out and choose which resorts are a part of their network. When you get to pick and choose like that, you can choose to pick on the good ones, which would usually larger and better resorts being added.

Largest Ski Resorts for Each Pass

Here, we picked out the top three largest resorts in each of the five nationwide multi-resort, multi-day lift pass networks.