Cross-Country Skiing in Wyoming: Where the Trails Are

10 trail systems in Wyoming say on their own pages that a machine goes on the trail, and the ones that publish a figure add up to 105 km. Sibley Lake Nordic Ski Area, run by Bighorn National Forest, is the largest of them at 15 miles (24 km). Another 1 place names ski trail without saying it is groomed.

Wyoming runs no single statewide ski pass. 1 of the 11 systems here charge for one, each on its own terms, and the rest ask nothing at the trailhead.

There is no single conditions report for Wyoming. 6 of the 11 systems publish a grooming report of their own, and those are linked beside each one below. The clubs and the nordic centers update theirs the most often, because skiing is the whole of what they do.

Grooming runs from about November through April, and groomers go out when new snow makes it worth doing rather than on a fixed calendar. That is Friends of Pathways’s own framing. Grooming is set by snow depth rather than by a date, so a system can sit idle inside its own season and run past the end of it in a good year.

A groomed trail has had a machine over it: the snow is compacted and, on most nordic trail, a pair of parallel tracks is cut into it for classic skis, with a flat lane beside them for skating. An ungroomed trail is whatever the last skier and the last storm left. Both are worth skiing and they take different skis, which is why these pages say which of the two a manager is claiming rather than counting every ski trail as the same thing.