The average cost of a day of skiing has skyrocketed in the last ten years and a single-day lift ticket now sells for more than ever. When you figure in the price of food, lodging and transportation up at the resort...forget about it. Without the self-styled discounts such as those found in this guide, it will cost well over $100 per person, per day. That's way too much for most people's vacation, let alone a ski bum on a tight budget. And everybody knows that a ski bum needs to ski or ride at least fifty days each year in order to satiate the addiction! That entails finding some way to get on the hill without paying full price for too many tickets. That’s mostly what you’ll learn in this guide – how to save money at the resort.

There’s actually a surprising number of ways to get cheap lift tickets and once you really know the deals, you start to realize there may be a way to ski absolutely free and maybe even make some bucks on the side.

One key is that there are a lot of vouchers and coupons available, so it is possible to collect enough vouchers and coupons via several venues to hold you for an entire season. Another key is cheap season passes. When you couple that with a little ski-bum savvy, you're well on your way to skiing or snowboarding for next to nothing. A few years ago we even found a way to make money by just parking in the right spot at our favorite ski resorts. You will learn some of our best secrets through the all-encompassing wisdom of the Ski Bum's Guide. In this guide we really do tell you about the stuff resort managers and others don't want you to know – the borderline legal stuff real ski bums do on a routine basis.

These are the true stories and secret ways of the ski bum. Thanks to the trial and tribulation of many, we have compiled and documented the dos and don'ts of obtaining discounted-to-free lift tickets, information on reselling those tickets and how to keep peace with the ski resorts when possible. These are all tips from people who have figured out just about every trick for getting up on a hill. Let us share these secrets with you.

Steven Steinberg and Darren Romar

Important Note

The Ski Bum’s Guide is for informational purposes only. If you choose to follow the information provided here, you do so at your own risk. We have no connection to the ski resorts, restaurants or hotels listed in this guide.

This guide explains the process and shows you the general places where you can find lift ticket deals, vouchers and coupons.

The Story

The Listerine Bottle and Schick Razor: A Ski Deal Breakthrough

Back in the late 1980s, Steve came across a major discovery:

“I was working at Safeway and one day I noticed there were these coupons attached to bottles of Listerine and packs of Schick Razors. The coupons were for a free lift ticket to Diamond Peak on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

“At the time, Diamond Peak had just made some improvements and they had previously changed their name from ‘Ski Incline’ to ‘Diamond Peak.’ They wanted to attract some attention and get more people out on the hill, so they were offering an incredible deal at stores in the Bay Area. Both of these products at the time retailed for under three dollars. I wondered, could it really be true?

“I borrowed $850 from my mom, bought an RV for $1,000 and moved up to the ski resort. Armed with 200 lift tickets, semi-clean breath and a five o-clock shadow (even though I had tons of new Schick Razors), I set out on my first mission to make money while skiing for nothing.”

Steve and Darren teamed up and started selling the tickets. Years later, Steve declared himself a professional ski bum living a life of luxury with his ski bum friends and their dogs. After years of refining the technique, we are now known as some of the world’s foremost ski bums, and we have a bunch of other ski and snowboard bum friends that cruise around with us, sometimes in the RV.

Today, we even have a sweeter motor home that, assisted by our income from third-party advertising, helps us through our ski bumming with several friends. When parked strategically in front of the right ski lift, the free flowing, built-in keg and tap serves to attract lift attendants who then become generously buzzed and allow our crew to go up the lift for free.

Obviously we love to ski and snowboard, and there is nothing better than skiing for free or at a reduced rate. We don't suggest or want anyone to break any laws but you must remember some of this information is borderline illegal, so be careful and don't get caught! You may want to stay away from the stuff that definitely is over the line (clipping lift tickets, trespassing on other people's property, and sneaking into hot tubs; or making yourself a guest at the local lodge without paying or having reservations, just to name a few).

The first thing you need to know is where to get cheap tickets, and with this guide we will give you a few ideas for where you can get them. Also, it helps if you know someone who works at a ski resort, such as a chairlift operator who will let you ride up for free. Then there's the very undesirable option of getting a job at a resort, for those who don't want to slide on through. But we think sliding works pretty well, so if you don't know anyone at the resort, just try bribing your way up any way possible!

Season Recap - A Day In the Life of A (Real) Die-Hard Ski Bum (based on real life examples)

Last Year I went to all the preseason ski and snowboard shows I could catch, along with the ski movies in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz, Calif. I got tons of free lift tickets covering all of the Tahoe Resorts. This year, I’ve gotten pretty sophisticated. After all, I consider myself a professional.

The fact is I’ve now figured out how to successfully ‘scalp’ a few tickets I pick up at shows. I finagle these into some pocket cash and I then convert that into a bunch more skiing and boarding. Now that I’m moving up in the world, I’m selling most of my tickets on eBay, though I keep a few back to sell at Tahoe, even though I don’t do much business at the resorts so as not to get nabbed.

Day 1 – Wednesday

It’s the middle of the week and all my tickets are good at this time, though some are not valid on the weekend. Around 4 p.m. I drive three hours from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe and I park my RV (which is actually a mobile traveler that looks more like a van) at Squaw Valley. I sleep in the comfortable bed in back.

Day 2 – Thursday

I wake up at about 7:30 a.m. when I hear the people who work at Squaw arrive. I make some hot tea and eat a sweet roll.

After a few more minutes, cars begin to pull up on each side of me and I ask the passengers if they have their tickets yet. When they say they don’t, I offer to sell them two of mine for $80. I’m one of the first up the hill for fresh tracks and I get in a full day of great skiing.

At 4 p.m. I head down the hill to The Resort at Squaw Creek for complementary hot cocoa and cookies because they were giving them out that day and I noticed the cookies when I went in to check it out. I then headed to the Squaw Valley Lodge on the free shuttle. I love those hot tubs, and they are easy to get into. Plus, on every other floor they have two washers and dryers so I take some soap, shampoo, and my razor to the Lodge with me. I put a load of dirty clothes in the washer before hitting the tub, thus killing two birds with one stone. After a long soak and finishing up my laundry, I head to the RV to change. Later, I’m off to a Club on the North Shore where I have a $700 credit. I bought their gold packages for $199 per pack. Remember, I’m in Casino-ville, so I’m employing the proper ski bum tactics to adapt to the area’s specific offerings. Incredibly, the purchase gave me a $200 bar credit, a $200 coffee shop credit, a $100 Steak and Lobster House credit, a $100 gambling credit (that I later sold for $75), and 10 free pulls on Mega Bucks – a free slot machine for patrons where the worst thing you stand to win is two free drinks. I also had a $50 Gift Shop credit.

They offer dinner specials for $5.99, but it cost me one-third of that price with my coupons. I get $600-worth of food and bar credit for just $199, so 13 drinks are also one-third the price. This place has a really good deal, and now I have a ton of food and drink coupons that should last me the better part of a winter season. I stay up late that night, and after leaving the club I head to the next resort, Diamond Peak, located three miles from Incline Village. I spend the night in the parking lot in my RV.

Day 3 – Friday

Diamond Peak is the last resort on the North Shore of beautiful Lake Tahoe and has a small crowd almost every day, even on the weekends. It’s a very small place, but it has a decent hill with more than 1,800 of vertical and pretty advanced terrain. Plus, the views of the lake and mountains at this place are absolutely unrivaled by any resort anywhere in the world. Most of the people who ski there have season passes and live at up in Tahoe, so selling tickets is very hard at Diamond Peak – they don’t really sell that many themselves. But I met some people the night before who were originally planning to ski up at Northstar, a ‘mega-resort’ on the western side of the lake’s North Shore. I saved them $40 on two tickets, so they skied Diamond Peak instead and I made $60!

I saw those people on the hill and they kindly thanked me for the tickets. They had never been to Diamond Peak before and they loved it, noting they had never seen such a great view of the lake from a run before. They were so psyched, they even treated me to lunch. They asked me if I had any more tickets to other ski resorts in the area for sale. Duh – of course I have lift tickets to every ski resort because I’m a professional ski bum.

After another great day of skiing, this time at the little gem called Diamond Peak, I head to the Tahoe Biltmore Hotel and Casino to use their hot tub and get some free food. They have a bar upstairs and downstairs too, and they put out free food from 4-7 p.m. everyday for bar patrons to enjoy. The Tahoe Biltmore also has some great ski-package deals. It can be really inexpensive, and it’s close to several of Tahoe’s best ski resorts. A big late winter/early spring storm is coming in and I park my RV in the free parking lot. By nightfall it’s really dumping and doesn’t look like it will let up for awhile, so I decide that I’m probably not going to ski tomorrow.

Day 4 – Saturday

Instead of trying to brave the horrid conditions, I visit a timeshare that is giving out two free Northstar lift tickets and dinner for two at the Sol’ Domain, one of Tahoe’s best restaurants. I ate my free dinners that night and took a tub. I had a couple of drinks with some free coupons I found in the Ski Tahoe newspaper and headed back to Squaw to spend the night. Unfortunately, my Squaw tickets are not valid on Sundays.

Day 5 – Sunday

So I sleep in until around noon. When I get up, some people are leaving and I ask them for their tickets. Sometimes you can trade for a beer or a 420 product, but they almost always give it to you for free. At about noon they start checking tickets for half-day skiing, so I attach my clipped ticket onto my ski boot. From experience I know the mostly teenage ticket checkers don’t like to bend over to examine your boot and so they won’t be able to tell I clipped it.

The entire time I have been selling tickets on eBay for an income, and the tickets I sell at Tahoe provide me with plenty of pocket money to spend on things I don’t have a coupon for. I’m trying to graduate from parking-lot selling, which is a rather high-risk proposition considering that scalping ticket vouchers is illegal. Nonetheless, I do this all winter, going from resort to resort skiing and trying to find coupons and other deals that I tell people about.

Follow my advice and you can travel the world, chasing winter, skiing everyday, and making a living (sort of), especially if you can manage to get a laptop so you can sell tickets on the web (and you’re totally nuts).

Riding the cable car up to High Camp is just one of the many year-round activities available at Squaw, which offers some of the most challenging ski terrain in Tahoe.

Squaw certainly delights in wintertime.

www.squaw.com

Is The Ski Bum Really Nuts?

Now this Ski Bum is really on the edge because he re-sells vouchers and uses the cash as supplemental income while he’s going from resort to resort skiing everywhere, all the time, for nothing. He uses it as a way to get into the inner workings of the resort personnel. He actually supplements that activity with some additional shady activities including bribing his way up on the hill and just making friends with lift operators and other key people.

But, in fact, to go to these extremes you’d have to be really committed (and probably should be – to a mental facility). In truth, you can’t collect a lot of ticket vouchers and re-sell them so easily, because you would have to scalp them, which is technically illegal and if you do it at the resort, you stand a good chance of being caught. Instead, this guy actually has a system on the computer that allows him to magnify his sales and avoid standing in the parking lot.

Why would anybody go to these extreme lengths?

I’ll tell you why. Because he doesn’t have much money and he wants to follow the snow, skiing at all the places he loves. He’s figured out a way to get it done and it makes perfect sense, really.

The question is why aren’t more resorts finding ways to allow people up on the hill cheaper, and why aren’t they finding a way to employ this guy as a marketing expert? Can you imagine how much free advertising is being given away to these resorts when people sell ticket vouchers on the Internet?

I’m not really sure what the answers are to these questions, but I am pretty convinced it has something to do with the fact the industry does not appeal to a broad spectrum of the economic strata, and are only now beginning to recognize the need for a new pricing scheme. Skiing and snowboarding should not be reserved only for the rich, but with $65 lift tickets, who else can afford it?

In short, we need to learn a few lessons from the diehards. If that guy can figure out how to get up on the hill and ski, even though he doesn’t have a dime in his pocket, then the industry can figure out how to get more people up there with him. And the answer is to read how, to develop a real understanding of what it takes and what some people are willing to do to enjoy this sport.

Obtaining Lift Tickets for Use or Sale

Ski Bum Extremes

There are a number of skiers and snowboarders who go to pretty extreme lengths to get up on the hill just because it is so expensive. Ticket voucher selling, along with clipping lift tickets, are both realities, but people who go to those lengths are pretty desperate and there are relatively few of them compared to the typical skier or snowboarder who is a mere vacationer in comparison.

Yet a lot of the people who work up at the resort area occasionally rely on some of these crazy ski-bum shenanigans. And you will find you can learn a thing or two from someone who knows "everything" about cheap skiing and snowboarding.

Getting an Early Start

The best advice is to plan ahead. Most of the ski guides, packages and vacations are sold during the normal ski season (November through April), but the best time to get your most desirable ski deals is October and sometimes even during the summer when everyone is still thinking about the beach.

Ski resorts want to get a jump-start on sales so they offer a lot of off-season specials, so be sure to take advantage of the coming year if it's not to late. Most ski resorts do little or no business from late spring until early fall, so they try to make up for it by offering some kind of summer attractions like scenic hiking, golfing, rollerblading, alpine sliding or motor biking. They really don't make a lot of money at this time of the year. It's just their way of holding their heads above water until the prime winter season starts up again.

Ski Resort Mailing Lists

Go to your favorite ski resort web site and register for their e-mail notifications. Find the websites at www.slide4less.com under the dropdown menu for North American Ski Resorts.

The resorts frequently offer contests where you can enter to win ski passes or even a free season pass just for joining their mailing list. They will also let you know about their discounts and specials only available to people on the mailing list. This is not a bad deal and you'll also be notified about good prices on discounted snowboards and skis during the sale of rentals and demos in the off-season.

Website Mailing Lists

There are also many ski and snowboard website mailing lists. At the end of this guide, we have provided a list of some of the more-visited ski and snowboard websites. Many of these sites advertise cheap and free lift tickets, or they may give out free lift tickets.

Season Passes

The last thing you are thinking about in June or July is skiing, but this is when some of the resorts advertise their biggest season-pass discounts.

If you ski a lot, buying one of the deep-discounted passes is usually the way to go. Sometimes it is worth it even if you are only going to ski five or six days out of the year. If you don't plan on skiing at just one place all season, most resorts still offer great deals during the off-season.

Season passé prices have plummeted at some resorts over the past few years. Nowadays, a season pass is usually the best way to go if you ski a lot.

Early- and Late-Season Specials

These tickets are often sold at a 20-percent discount or more. “Early season” is usually sold through the beginning of December and from the end of March through closing. These tickets are often sold at metropolitan, big-box sporting goods stores. Sporting goods stores may also have tickets available with a small discount in mid-season.

Group Tickets

Most ski resorts will reward you for being a group leader and bringing a group of visitors to their resort. Such rewards are usually in the form of a free lift ticket for every 10 tickets purchased, which barely qualifies as a deal. Groups get discounted tickets depending on the resort at a rate of about 10 percent up to 20 percent in some cases. Group tickets really only make sense on busy days when other discount options are not available.

Special Events

Check the web pages at your favorite resorts to see if they have any special-event days. These special days can range from food drives to clothing drives for the needy, or even early-to-late-season resort trash cleanup. In exchange you will receive a discount on a lift ticket for that day.

Torchlight Parade. Volunteering for special events equals free lift tickets. (Photo provided)

Creative-Writing Jobs Relating to Resorts

You can get free lift tickets for working at jobs other than the ski resort itself. We have even invented jobs to generate free lift tickets.

First of all we made ourselves ski and snowboard critics for a couple of raggedy magazines and that “press pass” turned out to be a magic wand. Try taking pictures and writing a story about a resort and sending the pictures to a magazine. If you can get a story published in a magazine or other publication, such as a third-party website, you're almost there. You can get a Media Pass (which in most cases is just a piece of identification saying you write “professionally” for a publication), or just use the fact that you have a published article by showing the resort the magazine containing your article or photographs.

We skied for free at the Olympics by writing some stuff for some of the same type of grunge magazines we submitted articles to years ago. The media center at the Olympics gave us free passes good at a bunch of resorts. Trading an article for a pass is actually a remarkably easy way to get free skiing if you can fall into the right situation and have a little talent to pull it off. If you can publicize the resort in any publication, they'll generally give you free skiing as a reward. After all, the advertising value of the published article is probably a lot greater for them than the ski day they'll give you.

If you really wanted to push it, you could simply get a small, local newspaper (even a weekly) to agree to look at something you write up about a nearby resort. If you can include something actually newsworthy, that's a real plus and will help your cause immensely. Then go search press passes on the web and find an image of a press credential. Download the image into Photoshop or any photo importation/design program and make yourself an official-looking press pass. Then have it laminated down at the copy shop, attach a string and hang it around your neck. There…you’re a journalist! If anybody asks any questions, you point them to the newspaper for confirmation that you have already “struck a deal” with them in advance to consider your finished work for possible future publication. Go into the marketing department at the ski resort and explain that you are submitting the article. Tell them you hope the resort might let you up on the hill for free to take pictures or gather more information for the article.

Believe it or not, there is nothing horribly illegitimate about this scenario, even when the reality is you have not yet written any article or taken a single picture. Most press passes, especially ones coming from small publications, are simply a laminated card that identifies you as a writer or photographer for the publication. Of course, in some cases a press pass is a lot more than that (particularly those issued by government entities such as the state police), but for your purposes it's just an identification card. There's nothing that can really happen to you except for the resort saying it doesn't want the “free” coverage, which is possible, though it would be quite short-sighted on their part.

It's highly recommended you first get the publication to agree to let you submit the article/photos. But even if you didn't tell the publication in advance, the fact is most editors would probably find it rather humorous and consider it a demonstration of your initiative and desire to become a journalist if you were to complete and submit the article afterward. Once you get an article in print, you can optionally use the article as a “clip”, or evidence to show the resort you've written stuff before and had it published. Remember, you have to start somewhere and the real ski bum takes advantage of all ski deals and is always thinking of the next big ski “scam” ($$$)!

Writing an article is a pretty innovative way of getting free skiing and it's also one the resorts like because display advertising is very expensive. You are potentially giving them good advertising by getting something positive about the resort in print. But there's probably something similar you could do in exchange for a ticket if you really wanted to put some thought and time into it. And for a lot of people, submitting articles is not an easy way to ski for free because it requires a mix of creativity, desire and an out-going personality to make the necessary contacts. It’s a lot of legwork for one free lift ticket, but the rewards will certainly increase if you are in it for the long run. In fact, you are never really going to be successful with something like that if you are simply trying to just “scam” your way in, even though that's how it starts for some people. Nonetheless, there should be the intent to try to publish an article if you expect it to work.

Websites and newsletters are often easier than other media avenues for getting your work published. A website like slide4less, for example, sometimes gets solicitations from people who want to “cover” a certain resort area for us and they'll offer to provide content we can use. You might be able to make an offer to a website as a content provider regarding a few select resorts in your ar