Missing Canadians, ‘white gold’ and a snow drought: The strange U.S. ski season

Jay Peak Resort in northern Vermont, above, is seeing epic snowfall this season but fewer Canadian skiers. The resort near the Canadian border relies heavily on Maple Leaf visitors. (Courtesy Jay Peak via CNN Newsource)

Steven Wright knew he had a problem long before the first snowflake fell.

Wright, who runs the Jay Peak ski resort in northern Vermont, realized something was wrong last summer while talking to Canadian season pass holders who had decided they wouldn’t be coming to the U.S. — or his property — for the 2025-26 winter ski season.

The political enmity between the U.S. and Canada had reached a fever pitch, especially once U.S. President Donald Trump began referring to Canada as “the 51st state,” and Jay Peak, located just nine miles south of the Canadian border, was going to pay the price.

“I called hundreds of season pass holders, and to a house, they mentioned the ’51st state’ thing,” Wright said in an interview with CNN.

He testified last year about the conversations to a U.S. Senate committee, and he said many of the customers “were choking up over the fact that they just couldn’t, in good conscience, come to the States.”

Beyond rhetoric about the 51st state, Trump had also ignited a trade war, with the threat and reality of stiff tariffs.

Jay Peak is arguably unique; 50 per cent of its business comes from Canada, which feels more like a neighbouring town than a foreign country.

Many U.S. ski resorts don’t rely as much on Canadian traffic. And as the season has progressed, the exodus of Canadian visitors has slowed significantly while the snowfall in the East has ramped up.

But Wright’s experience illuminates what he calls the current plight of “the border economies,” encompassing many business owners who live and work near the U.S.-Canada frontier.

It also humanizes the repercussions of recent trade policy: many Canadian residents are abandoning or severely curtailing their years-long tradition of visiting the U.S.

“We have a hockey arena — millions of dollars in hockey tournament business each year. We have a dozen restaurants on-site, conference space, wedding facilities. It all relies on Canadians to make it go,” he said.

The blow to Wright’s business and to other ski resorts in the Northeast and out West that depend on Canadian travellers comes at an unusual moment. Snowfall in the eastern U.S. this year has reached blockbuster levels. And much of the West has been suffering from a snow drought.

While the number of Canadian tourists continues to lag in the U.S., many American ski resorts on the East Coast are heaving a sigh of relief. The massive amount of snow falling on mountains this season is luring many American skiers, offsetting the Maple Leaf hiatus.

For Wright at Jay Peak, which has 81 trails, business is now only off 10 per cent to 15 per cent. But while he said he’s pleased after the season began with a much steeper decline, he has no illusions.

“Heavy snow has insulated us from the potential big downside of Canadian visitation. It has done so much to mitigate the situation with Canada,” he said. “What happens when that snow melts?”

Canadians are staying away and so is the snow out West

The number of Canadians re-entering Canada by car from the US was down every month last year, compared to 2024, according to Statistics Canada, the national statistical office. In December alone, there was a 30 per cent drop in traffic from December 2024.

U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office figures show a nearly 22 per cent drop in visitor arrivals to the U.S. from Canada last year through November, compared with 2024. Overall, international travel to the U.S. during that period dipped by 5.4 per cent. (Full 2025 figures are still being compiled).

The importance of Canada as a source of tourists — and tourism dollars — cannot be overestimated.

Canada is the largest source of international visitors to the U.S. More than 20 million Canadians visited the country in 2024, according to the U.S. Travel Association, generating US$20.5 billion in spending, as CNN reported last year.

But the snapshot out West is a more complicated one to decipher. Unlike the East, ski resorts in the West are starved for snow so there are fewer visitors from anywhere.

Vail Resorts, which operates about three dozen ski resorts in North America, including Breckenridge in Colorado, Hunter Mountain in New York and Mount Sunapee in New Hampshire, reported a 20 per cent decline in visits from skiers so far this season. The company’s CEO, Rob Katz told investors last month that it was “one of the worst early season snowfalls in the western U.S. in over 30 years,” according to a news release.

The company said snowfall at its western resorts was 50 per cent below its 30-year historical average in November and December.

It’s not surprising then that bookings by Canadian travellers at ski resorts out West were down 41 per cent last month, according to the data firm Inntopia.

To be sure, ski resorts have diversified in recent decades so many offer a host of other recreational activities — some tied to other winter sports, others completely snow-agnostic. For example, some ski resorts have built indoor water parks.

Snow-making operations have also long augmented what Mother Nature provides.

And some U.S. ski resorts rely much less on Canadian visitors in general. For example, the drop in Canadian visitation hasn’t hurt Smugglers’ Notch Resort in Jeffersonville, Vermont, much.

“We are definitely off on our bookings of Canadian travellers as compared to other years — they come mostly from Ontario — but we don’t have to bank on there being a ton of Canadian travellers,” said Matt McCawley, a spokesperson for the resort. “I think we are seeing more people traveling to Vermont, and I would assume it’s the same for New York and New Hampshire and Maine, just because of all that snow.”

By all accounts, the snow has been epic. McCawley says 508 centimetres have already fallen at his Vermont resort and he thinks a season record of over 1,016 cm might be broken.

“It’s like white gold,” he said.

Other resorts are located near Canadian provinces less vexed by the new political messages coming from the U.S. For example, Whitefish Mountain Resort in Montana draws visitors primarily from Alberta, where a local separatist movement has found common cause with the conservative MAGA movement in the U.S.

“Canadian visitation has always been a sizeable part of our business,” said Chad Sokol, adding there hasn’t been “a drastic drop.”

But beyond the ski resort, the town of Whitefish is seeing a sharp drop in Canadian visitors.

According to data collected by Explore Whitefish, the local tourism board, Canadian visitation fell nearly 25 per cent in 2025. The town is near Glacier National Park.

In a written statement, Explore Whitefish’s executive director, Zak Anderson, noted visits from Canadian tourists have long been “a cornerstone of Whitefish’s winter economy.”

In the case of Montana and other places, domestic tourists have stepped in to shore up some of the declines. What’s more, political tension isn’t the only factor keeping Canadians at home; the weak Canadian dollar is also partly to blame.

Ski resorts aren’t just in the snow business anymore

But property owners are already looking ahead anxiously to the summer when many resorts market themselves to Canadian mountain bikers, golfers and other outdoor enthusiasts.

At Killington in central Vermont, for example, the number of Canadian visitors who come to the resort for mountain biking was down double digits last summer, spokesperson Josh Reed said.

“It’s a huge piece of our summer business,” he said. “Folks from Quebec are big into mountain biking.”

Reed spoke to many mountain bikers who skipped their summer visits to the U.S. last year, and he said they were “extremely angry” over the political tensions.

Killington offered discounts and there were other incentives, including a campaign from the Vermont Mountain Bike Association, which hosted “Canadians Ride Free Day” in August, so the resort was able to lure back some of the customers from Canada who had stayed away.

“By the end of the summer, we were hearing more French,” Reed said, adding it’s an anecdotal measure of one slice of Canadian tourism.

That offered a respite for Killington and other tourism businesses in Vermont. But it underscores the year-round nature of the problem even for ski resorts. They aren’t just in the ski business — they are in the tourism business.

“The entire state of Vermont is suffering,” Wright said.

Border crossings by car between Vermont and Canada declined 27 per cent in 2025, according to statistics from the state of Vermont, which derives nearly 10 per cent of its gross domestic product from tourism.

It’s unclear how things will play out this year because as many have pointed out, the Canadian exodus resulted from far more than simply the discussion of tariffs. The rhetoric around annexing Canada and crowning it the 51st state rankled many Canadians, unearthing long-simmering tensions which have not abated. Just this week, Trump threatened to block the opening of a new bridge between the U.S. and Ontario.

Once the snow melts at Jay Peak, hockey tournaments dominate the summer schedule, and the most compelling matchups are between hockey-loving Canadians and their American counterparts.

“If Canadians don’t show up, it hurts our American market, too, because the American teams want to play the Canadians,” he said. “We don’t have a business then.”

That echoes a comment from an official with North Country Chamber of Commerce in Plattsburgh, New York.

“Our leisure travel market is about 70 per cent Canadians — it’s a very large part of what we do,” Kristy Kennedy, vice-president of marketing and business development for the North Country Chamber of Commerce in New York state, told CNN last year.

Tourism operators continue to roll out incentives aimed at Canadian tourists, which could eventually stem the tide. For example, Minot, North Dakota, is one of a growing number of towns where some businesses will accept Canadian dollars “at par,” even though the currency is weaker against the American dollar right now. (Even some casinos in Las Vegas have taken this extraordinary step of accepting Canadian loonies.)

The friendship between the two nations is a storied one and has endured many setbacks, observers say. The question is, how long will the two friends remain estranged?

“This will roll back,” said Wright at Jay Peak of the Canadian travel boycott. “But it will have a long tail for some Canadians.”

By Jeanne Bonner, CNN