Meet the Chairlift Buff Who Visited Every Ski Resort in North America

When a new Doppelmayr lift opens at a ski resort, the resort's owner or general manager receives a weighty, ceremonial bell to commemorate the occasion. Now, Peter Landsman, a lift supervisor, has a bell, too, which he received during a surprise celebration held by ski industry people at the Salt Lake City, Utah, airport.

They'd gathered to honor Landsman as he returned home from Moose Mountain, a small ski area in Canada's Yukon Territory. There, he'd completed his decades-spanning mission of visiting every ski area and chairlift in North America. "There are a few kind of private club resorts I just haven't been able to get access to," says Landsman, but if it's a public chairlift, he's seen it or ridden it.

For the feat, which covered 750 ski areas in total, Landsman was gifted a 2024-2025 season pass from Ski Utah, and Leitner-Poma, another lift manufacturer, gave him an assortment of swag. Someone brought a cake, too. The bell presented by a Doppelmayr representative, though, was the real pièce de résistance. "Receiving one of those is an incredible honor," says Dave Amirault, a longtime ski industry member and friend of Landsman who helped organize the airport surprise. "I think when he realized it was for him, it was probably one of the highlights of his life."

Landsman grew up in Seattle, Washington. His parents, originally from what he calls "hot places," discovered skiing after moving to the Pacific Northwest. Every Saturday in the winter, they loaded up the car with Landsman and his siblings and headed slopeside.

The Summit at Snoqualmie—back then, it was called Ski Acres—was where Landsman first learned to ski and developed an interest in chairlifts. During the 90s, the Summit's lifts were different colors. "That kind of fascinated me," he says. "They were all unique." Before Landsman could drive, he started begging his dad to take him to different ski resorts throughout Washington, and when he left the state to attend Colby College, Maine, he busied himself with visiting as many areas in the Northeast as possible.

In 2012, Landsman graduated and moved to Jackson, Wyoming. He told his parents he'd live there for one winter but hasn't left, working his way up the ranks at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. His current lift supervisor position allows him to focus on two of his favorite things: chairlifts and skiing.

"I like to nerd up on different transportation things," Landsman explains. "Lifts just happen to be a cool part of that that involves skiing, which is kind of a unique combination of mountains and snow and natural beauty, along with these really technical machines."

"If you're into planes, you have to just sit at airports. But if you're into ski lifts, you get to ski," he added.

Lift Blog, which Landsman runs in addition to his duties at JHMR, is a website that publishes news about the resort industry and hosts a comprehensive database of North American ski lifts. To continue growing the database, Landsman regularly travels  across the continent during his days off work, snapping photos and gathering chairlift information everywhere he goes. "I don't like to do things halfway," he says. "Once I started this blog, and I had all these lifts kind of on my radar, I just wanted to see all of them as quickly as I could." Whenever someone wrote in the comment section of Lift Blog that his database was missing a resort, it gave him additional motivation.

While Landsman's work schedule is somewhat conducive to travel—he works four days on and three days off—he's had to break his objective into smaller, bite-sized pieces. On some trips, Landsman skied multiple resorts in one day, and to maintain momentum, he continued his excursions in the summer. "I realized kind of partway through this that it was going to be really hard to do them all in the winter," he says. "A lot of the smaller mountains only operate for a couple months, and some of them only operate a couple days each week." If the lifts weren't running, as was the case with Moose Mountain, Landsman investigated them on foot.

The journey to visit the 750 ski areas took the better part of 25 years, encompassing countless hours of driving and flying. This winter, he flew 22 weeks in a row. "I joke that Peter treats the Delta app like it's Uber," says Amirault. Travel and mishaps are synonymous. But for Landsman, his trips have been mostly drama-free thanks to careful planning. The excitement he's experienced is reserved for wildlife encounters and, at one resort, ski patrollers who chased him who thought it was suspicious that he was taking photos of chairlifts.

Over the years, Landsman has become a walking chairlift dictionary. "He's a constant source of aggregating all this stuff that happens in the lift industry and lift culture," says Amirault. Landsman told The Colorado Sun that "I get a lot of emails from resorts asking questions about their own lifts," and a reporter from the Salt Lake Tribune frequently turns to Lift Blog for information on chairlifts. Landsman also regularly contributes writing to Ski Area Management (SAM) , a business-to-business North American ski resort industry publication.

"To find someone who not only has the interest and expertise in whatever given topic—in Peter's case, it's obviously ropeways—but for that person to also have writing chops and the ability to interview people and the ability to actually be a reporter at the same time, it's a rare combination," says David Meeker, the editor of SAM . "He's both a writer for us and a resource for other stories."

When I reached Landsman several days after his trip to Moose Mountain, he was already at another ski area: Breckenridge Resort, Colorado. "There was a lift here that opened last winter, but they made some significant modifications to it for summer operations. So I was taking some pictures of that," he told me.

Despite meeting his goal of seeing every ski area and lift in North America, there are over 50 new chairlifts under construction this summer across the continent, and Landsman aims to visit them all. In late June, a new gondola opened at LEGOLAND® New York called the Minifigure Skyflyer. "I already have a new lift to visit," Landsman says, whose database also includes ropeways outside of ski areas, like the Zoofari Skylift in Alabama.

As for the Doppelmayr bell? Landsman lives in an old apartment in Jackson, so, he says, "I might need to do some structural analysis to figure out where I can hang it and not damage the building."

Related: Bruce Oldham Is Trying To Do It All

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