Twenty lifts on a hill with 97 metres of vertical. That figure tells you what Afton Alps is, an area built for throughput, where you fit more runs into an afternoon than on a mountain five times the height.

It sits in the St. Croix river valley just outside Saint Paul, surrounded by Afton State Park, which makes it one of the nearest ski areas for a couple of million people. Floodlit evening skiing and one of the larger ski schools in the Midwest follow from that. It is on the Epic Pass.