The Hyde part -- the area's backside -- is serviced not by lifts but by a snowcat skiing operation whose headquarters is a steep-roofed shanty in Monarch's tiny base area.
Home to the Matterhorn, the Swiss ski resort claims to have the highest and biggest summer skiing operation in Europe with about 15 miles of runs and eight lifts open all summer long to reach terrain as high as 12,500 feet.
The resort has comfortable, even opulent, accommodations, excellent food and perhaps the highest ratio of guides and helicopters to skiers of Canada's major heli-skiing operations.
The best heli-skiing operations get many of their reservations more than a year in advance, and die-hard guests take great pleasure in signing up for their next trip as they finish the one they're on.
"We added it this summer," said Chris Ellms, director of ski operations at Bretton Woods.
Formerly just a base for heli-ski operations, Revelstoke is now marketing itself – rather successfully – as a new resort.
The result, says Simon Davies, Neilson's ski operations manager, is that "we don't have to wait until the following season to implement improvements".
Mathew Prior, who as the boss of Tui's ski operations is the most important figure in the business, believes that the market has bottomed out.
But Europe's more densely inhabited and typically steeper mountain ranges have largely proved prohibitive to new commercial ski operations other than heliskiing.
The scorecard, produced by a group called the Ski Area Citizen's Coalition, ranked resorts on 11 criteria that focus largely on issues like expansion and development through new housing, ski trails or ski operations.
