Photo: Brian Head Resort
The 2025-2026 season didn’t go the way most resorts would have liked. Big storms were few and far between in the Western United States, most of the winter was warmer than usual, and the beginning of spring saw temperatures that were more fitting for summer. Those factors led to many resorts shuttering their operations and closing earlier than normal only for April to do a 180 and deliver the powerful storms that were nowhere to be found in March. At Breckenridge Resort in Colorado and Utah’s Brian Head Resort, the welcome April snowfall has nudged resort officials to fire the lifts back up for bonus days.
The bonus day at Breckenridge will be Saturday, April 25, which initially closed on April 19. The resort planned a festive atmosphere for the occasion, calling for a “Peaks and Beats” celebration and offering free lunch to the first 500 Epic Pass holders. This comes after the mountain got several inches through the original closing weekend (not even a week ago). Colorado had historically low snowfall this season, including an astonishing 18 snow-measuring sites across the state having no snowfall to record on April 1. The Colorado Climate Center’s Russ Schumacher dubbed it “the worst year for Colorado snowpack in recorded history.”
Utah’s Brian Head Resort, meanwhile, announced a similar season encore this week. This Sunday, April 25 marks the final date for daily operations this season, but it announced an extra weekend of riding on Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3. Those bonus days are going to push the small, 650-acre resort up to 159 days of skiing and riding following a November 21, 2025 season kickoff. That leaves them short of 2024-2025’s 181 days (just two days shy of Solitude Mountain’s 183 that year), but it still amounts to one of Utah’s longest seasons.
Considering the painful winter so many people pushed through, nobody’s going to look back and regret getting one or two more days of hot laps.
