OK, it’s not technically true that ski conditions right now are worse than ever. The snowpack at Colorado ski resorts today (Jan. 16, 2026) is not worse than the snowpack in, say, an average August.

But for this time of year, the Colorado snowpack is officially the worst on record.

That’s right, since the time they’ve been keeping records of the Colorado snowpack, this is the lowest it’s ever been for mid-January. It’s barely half the normal. The forecast for the next ten days is more of the same – warm and dry.

My eyes confirm all this. The snowpack on top of Vail Pass at 10,662 feet is barely over my shoe tops.

In the town of Vail itself, about 2,700 feet lower, there’s bare dirt where there’s supposed to be deep drifts. The kitschy Norman Rockwell style sculptures littering Vail which are supposed to be buried under the winter snow are fully visible. That’s a bad thing; that stuff shouldn’t be visible even in the summer.

The ski resorts try to hide all this bare dirt with snowmaking equipment. Not by parking the equipment on the bare slopes, but by using it to make artificial snow that they spray over the slopes at night.

But that doesn’t work very well. Even a modest-sized resort of three thousand acres can cover only a fraction of the slopes with artificial snow. Moreover, they can’t cover the slopes deep enough to safely bury rocks and tree stumps. They instead succeed in burying such obstacles just enough to conceal them with a half inch of artificial snow – until the customer hits one.

As for the challenging terrain of blacks (lower case “b”), double blacks and extreme stuff, forget about it. They won’t be open at all this season, or at least not safely. The open terrain at Copper Mountain right now is barely a third of their total terrain. In a normal mid-January, it would be more like 90%.

The daily lift ticket price at Aspen is $254. That amounts to about $1.00 per snowflake.

But cheer up. It’s only about ten cents per a-hole.

I see two things to cheer about amid this skiing catastrophe. First, driving is great. The roads are snow-free. In fact, they’re bone dry, even over the high passes.

As I mentioned in a recent piece, the Catch 22 of skiing is that when the skiing is good because slopes are snowy, you can’t get there because the roads, too, are snowy. And when the driving is good because the roads are snow-free, the skiing is bad because the slopes, too, are snow-free.

Moreover, traffic volume is down. Skiers are staying home because they know that, since the roads are great, the skiing is terrible.

The second good thing about the skiing catastrophe is that it allows Colorado to be, once again, something like Colorado – the Colorado I grew up in. The Colorado of the Ute Indians and Zebulon Pike and Molly Brown. OK, maybe John Denver. The others were all before my time (but not by much.)

Skiing, you see, ruined Colorado. And I say that as a person who used to ski upwards of fifty days a year, including significant backcountry winter ascents coupled with skiing descents.

Resort skiing has nothing to do with nature. A ski resort is like a mountain converted into an expensive amusement park full of no-nothing morons who ski the way they drive – too fast for their ability and with little regard for others.

A few more years of great winter driving conditions, and Colorado might again be Colorado. We might get rid of the skiers from out-of-state.

Now if only they would take with them the wolves from British Columbia, the potheads from California, and the Democrats from all over . . .