TL;DR
Monarch Mountain will close this Sunday after a historically poor snow season, joining a growing list of Colorado resorts shutting down weeks ahead of schedule. The ski area had originally planned to operate through mid-April.
Multiple Colorado resorts abandon their season plans as minimal snowfall forces unprecedented closures
Monarch Mountain will shut its lifts this Sunday after what operators are calling a historically poor snow season. The ski area had planned to operate through 12 April but will instead close three weeks early, joining at least six other Colorado resorts forced to pull the pin on their seasons ahead of schedule. It's the kind of closure announcement that's become uncomfortably frequent as the 2025-26 Northern Hemisphere season winds down, and it raises some obvious questions about snow reliability in the region.
The damage across Colorado
The list of early closures reads like a roll call of Colorado's smaller operations. Ski Cooper near Leadville managed just over 100 days before closing last Sunday - it typically runs through early to mid-April. Sunlight Mountain in Glenwood Springs and Howelsen Hill in Steamboat Springs both closed the same day. Telluride and Purgatory, both in the southwest, have announced 5 April as their closing date.Even Steamboat Ski Resort, one of the state's larger operations, has moved its closing forward by a week to 12 April. That's particularly notable given these bigger resorts have more resources to work with - snowmaking capacity, grooming fleets, and the financial incentive to stay open as long as physically possible.
