Night skiing at Keystone will end at 7 p.m. this year, an hour earlier than in the past, as the resort continues to scale back an experience that has long set it apart from most other Colorado ski resorts.
Local residents, who remember when the ski resort used to offer Wednesday and Thursday night skiing just a few years back, expressed dismay as what once made Keystone shine a little brighter than other resorts in their minds has been rolled back once again.
“It’s very disappointing to see,” Silverthorne resident Nathan Yan said. “For me it kind of turns me off to wanting to associate or think of Keystone as my home mountain.”
Yan has lived Summit County full-time for three years and said he’s lived here on and off since 2016, when he was “kind of a roving van dweller.” He had never skied at night before skiing at Keystone but quickly fell in love with the experience.
On his first time night skiing at Keystone, Yan said he met a guy with a pair of light-up skis that were “do-it-yourself style.” Soon, he was on a kick, using his electrical engineering skills to design his own light-up skis, he said.
Everybody was always in such a good mood to night ski, with goofy costumes and Wednesdays and Sundays being a particularly good time for locals to get together to night ski, Yan said.
Like last year, Keystone this year will only offer night skiing on Fridays, Saturdays and select holiday Sundays. The ski resort ended Wednesday and Thursday skiing ahead of the 2020-21 season. Keystone hasn’t offered night skiing seven days a week since 2001.
We are always looking at our operations and guest behavior at the resort to help inform decisions,” Keystone communications manager Max Winter said in an email, when asked about the latest night skiing rollback.
Keystone typically sees the highest demand for night skiing on Fridays, Saturdays and holidays and lower use in the late-evening hours past 7 p.m., Winter said. He added, “This season’s night skiing calendar reflects that behavior.”
Silverthorne resident J.D Rockwell shared a memory from when he worked at Arapahoe Basin Ski Area after he first came to Summit County. He said he would get off work and drive straight down to Keystone’s Hunky Dory Lot with coworkers to walk one minute to the gondola to night ski.
With night skiing open fewer days than it used to be, it has become more crowded when he does go, Rockwell said. He said night skiing is always what has set Keystone apart from other ski areas and is sad to hear about the resort scaling it back.
“They’re the only resort other than Steamboat that offers night skiing and I think they should capitalize on that,” Rockwell said. “I think it would be good for business, and the locals would appreciate it.”
Yan said he’s never harbored the hatred for big companies like Vail Resorts that some people do, and he can understand that business considerations can drive decisions about hours. Still, his perception of Keystone has changed as the resort rolls back part of what enticed him to move to Summit County in the first place.
“This is kind of my turning point, my Roman Empire kind of thing,” Yan said. “I feel viscerally that they’ve taken away something that I identified with the local Summit County ski experience.”