Ratings Adjustment: Re-Navigating Criteria for Three Resorts
Alta’s High Traverse may be stunning, but the large expert area lacks trail markings entirely once past the gates. Alta is one of three resorts that sees a 2022 PeakRankings Mountain Score change due to navigational circumstances.
The below changes come as part of a series of PeakRankings Mountain Score recalibrations implemented this month. To see the full list of adjustments, click here.
As part of a broader overhaul of our PeakRankings Mountain Score criteria this spring, we’re making some slight tweaks to our Navigation category. These changes aim to better encompass certain facets that make it difficult to get around. Three larger destination resorts are impacted by this change, with reasoning detailed below.
Keystone
Navigation Score Change: 7 to 6
Keystone shows that even if a mountain does everything right with signage and trail markings, it can still be rather annoying to reach certain mountain areas. This Colorado resort essentially comprises three back-to-back mountains that are staggered behind one another, and while traveling between these mountains is very clear and straightforward, getting to and from the furthest resort areas takes quite awhile. For those looking to explore Keystone’s Outback area, a journey to this terrain takes at least three lifts, and a journey back to the base takes at least two—with travel times in both directions taking at least 30 minutes. In adjusting Keystone’s Navigation score, we aim to bake this intra-resort travel lengthiness into our criteria.
Winter Park
Navigation Score Change: 7 to 6
We’re dropping Winter Park’s Navigation score due to minute but very impactful experience situations that we previously passed over—the difficulty of reaching two major junction points from select mountain areas. This score adjustment intends to capture the following circumstances:
Getting from Panorama to Lunch Rock without taking any other lifts, which requires an arduous uphill catwalk
Getting to the Sunspot Lodge, which is impossible to reach without taking a lift first; getting here from any upper-mountain or Mary Jane area—including the Olympia lift, which ends just a few hundred feet away—requires taking a short surface lift.
Alta
Navigation Score Change: 7 to 6
Signage and overall layout of the mountain make Alta easy to get around for those who stay on beginner and intermediate trails. But once you hit the expert traverse areas, the trail markings disappear entirely, making it extremely difficult to find certain trails—or routes back to certain lifts.
Keystone, Colorado’s Outback zone in March 2022. Outback is a long way from the front face of the mountain—it takes at least two lifts to get back to the bases.
For more on our PeakRankings Mountain Score Navigation criteria, see our detailed ratings thresholds for this category.
