White Pass Ski Area

White Pass Ski Area opened in January 1953 with rope tows on a hill called Poma Face, added its first chairlift, Pigtail I, in 1956, and a second the following decade before growing into its current footprint with the 2010-11 Paradise Basin expansion, which added roughly 767 acres of terrain. That history includes a genuine Olympic pedigree: World Cup racing twins Phil and Steve Mahre grew up at White Pass, where their father managed the mountain, long before either won Olympic alpine skiing medals.

The resort today runs 8 lifts, five chairlifts, a platter, and two magic carpets, across 55 runs totaling 35.77 kilometers, with a 620.1-meter vertical drop between a 1,987.4-meter summit and a 1,367.3-meter base in Washington’s Cascade Range. Terrain leans intermediate, 20.5 of the 35.77 kilometers, well over half, ahead of 10.39 kilometers easy and 4.38 kilometers advanced, with slopes primarily facing north for more consistent snow retention through the season.

A group of Yakima businesspeople bought the resort in December 2021, taking over an operation that has continued modernizing its lift fleet since, including the removal of the historic Pigtail II double chairlift in the summer of 2023 and work on a Chair 4 replacement that began in April 2025. Beyond alpine terrain, White Pass runs a Nordic Center with 26 kilometers of maintained cross-country trails, giving it a broader winter sports identity than the lift-served acreage alone suggests.

Yakima Air Terminal, 65.4 kilometers away, is the nearest airport, followed by Tacoma Narrows at 114.6 kilometers and Seattle-Tacoma International just beyond it at 114.8 kilometers. Kent, Washington, population around 127,000, is the closest listed city at 105.4 kilometers, narrowly ahead of Tacoma and Renton. With 8 lifts serving 55 runs, just under 7 runs per lift, White Pass has grown steadily rather than dramatically since its 1953 founding, expanding roughly one era at a time from rope tows to a resort with real depth in intermediate terrain and a Nordic program to match.

A day lodge with rental equipment and dining anchors the base area, and the White Pass Village Inn gives visitors an on-site overnight option rather than requiring a drive back down to Yakima or the Puget Sound side of the Cascades after skiing, with a second lodge reportedly in development as part of the new ownership group’s plans. That steady, incremental style of growth, a lift replaced here, a chairlift removed there, a new lodge planned for down the road, mirrors the mountain’s original expansion pattern from a single rope tow in 1953 through sequential chairlift additions in the 1950s and the larger Paradise Basin terrain expansion in 2010. For skiers based in the southern Puget Sound region, White Pass’s position on the drier, more consistently snow-holding eastern slope of the pass, combined with its family ties to genuine Olympic racing pedigree through the Mahre twins, has made it a dependable alternative to the wetter, more crowded resorts closer to Seattle and Tacoma.

Yakima Air Terminal’s relatively short 65.4-kilometer distance gives eastern Washington travelers a closer air option than the Seattle-area airports, which sit close to 115 kilometers away on the other side of the pass, a split that roughly divides the resort’s visitor base between the drier Yakima Valley side and the more populous, wetter Puget Sound side of the Cascades. That two-sided draw, together with the Nordic Center’s cross-country trails, has let White Pass build a broader winter sports identity than a single-discipline alpine resort of similar size might otherwise achieve.