The Antelope Butte Mountain Recreation Area will be opening for the season on Friday, December 20.
The ski area near Shell, Wyoming closed in 2004 but reopened last year with only 10 percent of the mountain open.
This season, the mountain will be 98 percent open, Antelope Butte Foundation Executive Director John Kirlin said.
"We'll have both of our chair lifts running and our new SunKind conveyor lift that we received a grant from the Wyoming Business Council to install," he said.
Kirlin said they sold around 2,200 lift tickets total last season.
"We anticipate at least doubling, maybe even tripling that. We built our financial projections kind of conservatively over the years. We built them based off having 6,500 skier visits a year, and that's about what it will take for use to be truly sustainable when the mountain is open," he said.
Kirlin said they are finishing renovations to the ski lodge, which he hopes will open in mid-January.
Antelope Butte was once a big part of winter sports in northern Wyoming, especially in communities around the Bighorn Mountains like Sheridan and Dayton.
"I've heard story after story after story about what the mountain has meant to people when they grew up and just the culture that there was...People tell stories about how they loved being up there as kids and now they have children of their own and they're excited to offer it again," he said.
While Antelope Butte will be typically open Friday through Sunday during the ski season, the mountain will be open every day, except Christmas Day, through January 5.
Have a question about this story? Contact the reporter, Catherine Wheeler, at cwheel11@uwyo.edu.
