The True Cost of Snowboarding (and how it compares to other activities)

Since we’ve announced our move to Colorado, it seems that invariably I almost immediately get one of two questions:

• Why Colorado? / Did you get a job in Colorado?
  -OR-
• Are you going to go snowboarding?

The second question is somewhat amusing and as you’d probably guess is usually asked almost entirely by males.

I was curious so I investigated.  A basic beginner’s startup package would cost about $400 for board, boots, and bindings.  Add another $250 of snow clothes that you got on sale at a winter store blow out and you’re good to go.  We’ll use $650 as an average “startup” cost for getting into the sport.

The real bucks start coming out when one talks about lift tickets.  The “at the window” price seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 for a single day.  An all season pass will start at around $500 for a single resort and go up from there for multi-resource passes.

This seemed really expensive to me so I wanted to break it down to understand it better.  Here’s a simple formula for that:

(ticket cost) / (hours x 60) = cost per minute

Assuming one has 12 hours of activity time on a given weekend, if you were to spend an hour or so driving to get there, an hour or so taking a break, and another hour taking a break for lunch, you’d end up with about 9 hours of actual activity time.  At 9 hours “on the slopes”, the cost per minute of a $60 lift ticket is 11.11 cents per minute.

But to get an idea of the true cost of snowboarding I needed to factor in the purchase of gear.  Assuming that gear purchased will last for 4 years, we arrive at a cost of $162.50/year for equipment.  Our imaginary season pass will cost us $500 a season and we’re estimating that we’ll go regularly at maybe 15 times per season.

($500 pass + $162.50 annual gear) / 15 visits = $44.17 per visit

($44.17 per visit) / (9 hours x 60) = $0.08 per minute for a season of snowboarding

So we can conclude that if one was to participate fairly frequently (but not every weekend) in snowboarding and purchase a beginner’s gear startup kit, they would spend approximately 8 cents per minute over a 5 year span on that activity.

Now, to put that into perspective, here are some other activities with their per-minute cost calculated for comparison:

Activity	Cost-Per-Minute
Costco shopping trip	$2.22 / min
Tandem Skydiving	$0.83 / min
Going to a fancy restaurant	$0.44 / min
Being a church member (avg. tithing, 4 hr/week attendance)	$0.43 / min
Going to McDonalds	$0.20 / min
Attending Hanalani	$0.15 / min
Visiting a museum	$0.14 / min
4-day Caribbean Cruise	$0.13 / min
Going to a movie theater	$0.12 / min
Talking on a cellphone (avg. monthly fee)	$0.12 / min
Watching basic cable TV (avg. monthly fee)	$0.08 / min
Playing billiards	$0.08 / min
Going bowling	$0.08 / min
Snowboarding	$0.08 / min
Six Flags for a day	$0.08 / min
Renting a movie	$0.04 / min
Buying/reading a novel	$0.03 / min
Having basic Netflix	$0.02 / min
Playing World of Warcraft	$0.01 / min

(activities that are not pay-per use were calculated assuming a average rate of consumption in minutes divided by the monthly cost)