Colorado has the Rockies. New York has… hills. So how does New York finish within a whisker of Colorado on the ski quiz?
A ski area needs three things: a slope, air cold enough to keep snow sitting on it, and a lift to carry people back up.
Basis: The basic ingredients of a ski area — plain geography.
Hills don't have to wait for the sky. A snow gun blows tiny water droplets into cold air; they freeze on the way down and land as snow. It only works when the air is cold enough.
Basis: Snowmaking is standard, well-documented technology at ski areas.
The West's ski areas sit on high mountains; the Northeast and the Great Lakes states have much smaller hills — but a lot of them, scattered near towns and cities. New York ends up with more ski businesses than Vermont, and more than Utah.
Basis: U.S. physical geography (the Rockies are far higher than the Appalachians) plus this site's Census data, which is machine-checked for the New York–Vermont and New York–Utah comparisons.
Why so many little hills in the East? Being close to where millions of people live means a small hill can fill its lifts on an ordinary weeknight — but that's a reasonable guess about why, not something this table proves.
※ A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
📊 Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.