Powder Magazine dropped a headline this week that stopped my scroll: “40 Inches Overnight With No Signs of Slowing Down: South America’s Ski Resorts Buried in Snow.”
It’s mid-July. Your mountain is probably running bike camps and hosting wedding parties. And in the Andes, lift operators are digging out chairlifts from four feet of overnight accumulation.
Most resort marketing teams see that headline and keep scrolling. That’s one of the most consistently missed opportunities in summer resort content — and it happens every single year.
Your Ski Audience Never Clocked Out
Your core audience — the people who renew passes without being prompted, who follow you on every platform, who have opening day circled on their calendar — doesn’t stop thinking about skiing in July. They’re checking conditions at Portillo. They’re watching World Cup edits from Valle Nevado. They’re 120 days out from your opening day and quietly counting down.
The resorts that understand this treat July as a content opportunity, not a content gap.
Here’s what the content split looks like in practice:
Best viewed on desktop — scroll horizontally on mobile
| Most Resorts in July | Smart Content Teams in July |
|---|---|
| Bike park promos only | Bike park + early ski-season teasers |
| Standard event calendar | Events + Andes powder content with a wink |
| Zero ski content | ”Meanwhile, in Chile…” reposts |
| Summer F&B promotions | F&B + “90 days until the chairlift spins” |
The play isn’t complicated. Share the South American powder coverage. React to it. Post the Powder Magazine headline with a caption: “Pass holders, bookmark this feeling for November.” It costs nothing and keeps every pass holder thinking about your mountain.
The Bigger Risk: Training Your Audience Wrong
Here’s the strategic issue nobody talks about — it’s a slope-ful of missed opportunity that quietly compounds.
Summer programming is real revenue and absolutely worth promoting. But if your content calendar goes fully bike-and-brunch from June through October, you’re slowly training your audience to think of you as a “mountain resort” rather than a ski mountain. Those are different brands with different emotional hooks.
The ski identity is the more powerful one. Protect it.
Use the Southern Hemisphere ski season as a natural content rhythm anchor. When Portillo drops 40 inches overnight, share it. When World Cup racing runs at Coronet Peak in August, post about it. Drip ski content through your summer feed — light enough not to confuse the summer-activity audience, consistent enough to keep your core skiing audience fired up.
One Move to Make This Week
Pull a South American powder story from this week — Powder Magazine and Unofficial Networks both ran heavy coverage — and build one piece of content around it. An Instagram story. A 30-second reel from your archive footage with an opening-day countdown. A quick email to your pass holder list.
That’s it. One post. Done consistently through the summer, it compounds into the most energized pass base you’ve had come October.
The resorts that open in November with the most engaged audiences aren’t the ones who shouted loudest in October. They’re the ones who kept ski stoke alive all July.
What does your summer content mix look like right now — are you still showing up for your ski audience, or has it gone all bikes and brunch?
