Today marks the last day of early season pricing for Steamboat Season Passes and 100 days until the mountain opens on November 23rd for Scholarship Day. Scholarship day is always scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving and is the first day Steamboat Ski area opens with a fundraiser for the local Winter Sports Club.
Lift tickets are $15 and all of the proceeds go to Winter Sports Club programs that train local kids in plethora of Winter Sports events. More Olympians have come from or trained in Steamboat than any other town in the World and that is due to the efforts of the Winter Sports, local parents, and the need to step up to hang with with your friends.
The other side benefit of Scholarship day is that 2 out of 3 years the skiing can be outrageously good. Since it is the first day the mountain opens and they only tend to groom the major feeder runs it is not uncommon to find 3 or more feet of untouched snow on the upper mountain runs and even more in the trees. If you are a dedicated powderhound I recommend planning your Thanksgiving vacation to be here to take advantage of scholarship day. Its worth it just to miss traveling on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving alone. Just rembember the base below isn't packed down so you need to ski around or lean back ot go over any suspicious bumps in the snow.
Most of the time you don't know until a few days beforehand how good it will be since the storms seem to really kick in either the weekend before or the week of Thanksgiving. If you need to spend the holiday with family don't despair because the week after Thanksgiving is even more reliable for good snow. Before I lived here I would often be driving home Sunday night or Monday morning is a good blizzard wishing I could turn around and stay. Prices are great that week and there is much less competition for the snow.
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