Score Change: McCoy Park Is Beaver Creek’s Most Consequential Expansion in Decades

Beaver Creek’s beginner-centric McCoy area, pictured here in March 2022, brings a kick to the resort that earns it a PeakRankings Mountain Score adjustment.

Background

This past winter, Beaver Creek finally completed its McCoy Park terrain expansion project. This project brings 250 new acres of beginner and intermediate terrain and adds 17 new trails—mostly naturally-developed glades and open bowl-like meadows—to the resort. With Beaver Creek’s historical shortcomings in bowl terrain, this expansion has been highly anticipated, offering a potential to shake things up. This past winter, we revisited the resort to check out the new area for ourselves.

Mountain Experience Changes

We’ll start by saying McCoy Park exceeded our expectations. The expansion is a game changer—plain and simple.

The new zone entirely comprises beginner and intermediate terrain, but its differences are what truly makes it stand out. No other Front Range resort has terrain even remotely like McCoy; the area varies between tighter glades and wide-open meadows, and its diversity of trees reminds of a botanical garden. A 250-acre increase is already sizable on its own, but each line down McCoy Park offers its own unique feel, yielding a choose-your-own-adventure-like atmosphere. One can probably spend an entire day finding new paths without getting bored, which is a remarkable thing to say about beginner terrain. It’s hard to find terrain this easy that’s this enjoyable anywhere else in North America.

The McCoy expansion brings two new lifts, and we have mostly positive but mixed feelings about the setup. The primary lift—the McCoy Park Express—is a high-speed quad that services the entire McCoy area. There is no way to ski out from the bottom of McCoy Park, and a secondary quad, known as Reunion, provides direct service back to other resort areas. However, this lift is a slow, fixed-grip quad, which is remarkable for a resort like Beaver Creek that has high-speed lifts essentially everywhere.

That being said, the Reunion lift is mostly a redundant lift; guests of intermediate and better proficiency can fully avoid it by taking a trail out from the top of McCoy Park lift. The only time exception is for those stuck at the bottom after 3pm, when the McCoy zone closes and the main McCoy Park Express lift shuts down. Riding Reunion at the end of the day is not the most enjoyable experience, as the high traffic and concentration of beginners results in lots of lift slowdowns and misloads. A lot of Beaver Creek frequenters told us they were not happy about the decision not to make this lift high speed.

So Beaver Creek still lacks the advanced bowl terrain that most of its competitors offer to at least some degree, but the resort now forges its own path with perhaps the best beginner bowl-like terrain in the state. On top of that, McCoy Park offers a feeling of isolation and distinguishing atmosphere that elevates the resort’s overall quality.

As a slow, fixed-grip quad, Reunion feels a bit out of place at the extremely moneyed Beaver Creek.

Mountain Score Impacts

Beaver Creek’s impressive McCoy expansion has earned it a PeakRankings Mountain Score increase. The resort now offers terrain in nearly every category—with advanced and expert bowls being the one notable exception—and pairs its strong groomers and uniquely long steeps with a new injection of non-traditional beginner and intermediate meadows. As a result, we’ve increased Beaver Creek’s Terrain Diversity score from a 7 to an 8.

McCoy Park also earns the resort an improvement in our Mountain Aesthetic category. The resort will not see a point shift from this change due to a broader category revamp that will also be released in the coming days, but the new zone brings a new isolation and distinctiveness to the resort that materially changes the experience of spending time at Beaver Creek.

Beaver Creek now ranks as 2nd in Colorado—pulling ahead of Telluride—and is now 8th overall.

For more on Beaver Creek, check out our full mountain review and Colorado resort rankings.

Beaver Creek Score Change

7

Previous Terrain Diversity Score

8

New Terrain Diversity Score

76

Previous Overall Score

77

New Overall Score