Who makes this, and why you can trust the numbers
The short version: we're a small team in Salt Lake City who wanted to know what the coming ski season had in store — and got tired of the only answers coming from the people selling passes. PassCast costs nothing to use and earns nothing from your decision: no affiliate links, no commission, no sponsored rankings, no login. Every autumn skiers spend four figures on a pass largely on faith. This is our attempt at checking the maths.
What we will never doThe commitments that make the verdicts worth reading
- No affiliate linksWe earn nothing whether you buy a pass or don't. Several passes are told “skip it” on this site.
- No paid placementNobody can pay to be included, ranked higher, or described more kindly.
- No hiding bad resultsWe publish our own forecast accuracy, including the finding that our previous model was worse than useless.
- No fake precisionWhere the data can't separate two mountains, we say so instead of ranking them anyway.
What's actually in hereAs of 2026-07-27
Every pass price is checked by hand against the official source and stamped with the date it was verified — including the ones still showing last season's price because the resort hasn't published 2026-27 rates yet. We'd rather show you a dated old number than a confident wrong one.
Use the data
Everything here is free to build on. If you're a journalist, researcher or developer, the numbers are yours.
There's an open JSON endpoint at https://skipassplanner.com/api/passcast/{resort-slug} — no key, no rate limit, no sign-up. It returns the full forecast for any tracked mountain: percentiles, powder days, the skiability breakdown, monthly outlook, and which signals are driving it today. Slugs match the URLs on this site, so /api/passcast/alta works.
Please cite PassCast and link back if you publish something using it — that's the only payment this site asks for. There's also an RSS feed of daily snow and pass updates.
About PassCast: straight answers
- Who is behind PassCast?
- A small independent team based in Salt Lake City — skiers who spend the autumn arguing about the same question everyone else does: what is this winter actually going to do, and is the pass worth it? We're not a resort, a pass company, or a media group. PassCast started because we wanted an honest answer to that question and couldn't find one that wasn't written by someone selling passes.
- How does PassCast make money?
- It doesn't. There are no affiliate links, no commission on pass sales, no sponsored placements, no ads, and no paid rankings. This is deliberate: the moment a site earns money per pass sold, its verdicts stop being trustworthy. Running costs come out of our own pockets. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before anything else changes.
- Is PassCast affiliated with Epic, Ikon, or any resort?
- No. We're not affiliated with Vail Resorts, Alterra, Mountain Collective, Indy Pass, or any individual resort. Nobody pays to be included, ranked higher, or described favourably. Several resorts come out badly in our numbers, and they stay that way.
- Where does the data come from, and can I check it?
- Snow records come from ERA5, the European reanalysis of past weather, calibrated to each resort's own published long-term average. Live forecasts come from Open-Meteo's multi-model blend. El Niño data comes from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center and the IRI. Pass prices are checked by hand against each pass's official site and stamped with the date they were verified. Every resort page names its sources, and the full method is on the methodology page.
- How accurate is it, really?
- We test it and publish the score, including when it's unflattering. Across 8,712 back-tested resort-seasons our forecast beats "assume an average winter" by 0.8% — real, but small. It's worth nothing at all in about half the regions we cover, and we say so on those pages rather than quietly pretending otherwise.
- Can I use PassCast data on my own site?
- Yes. There's a free JSON API at /api/passcast/{resort-slug} with no key required, returning the full forecast for any tracked mountain. Use it for research, journalism, or your own projects — a link back to skipassplanner.com is appreciated but not required. If you're doing something interesting with it, get in touch.
Found something wrong? Corrections are genuinely welcome — a site whose whole argument is “check our work” has to mean it.