22 Colorado ski swaps to help you save on winter gear

Ski season starts in July for Jeremy Speaks, who spends about half his year running the Rocky Mountain Ski Swaps, or, as he described it, the “family-passion side project.”

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The swaps were started in Ogden, Utah, in 2010 by Speaks’ father-in-law, Dale Roberts. Roberts would be the CEO of the company if there was a CEO, Speaks said. Speaks would probably be the operations officer, his sister-in-law the marketing director. Again, that’s if they had titles.

In 2024, the family biz, which by then was running five markets around Utah, crossed the Rockies and set up a swap at the Jeffco Fairgrounds in Golden. Last year, they hosted ski swaps in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, too.

“I wish I could say we have a magic formula, or that it was super professional, but we really just came to Denver a couple years ago and the response was huge. We thought, well, Colorado Springs is just down the road, let’s take a look,” Speaks said. “There’s a massive military community there, and lots of families. And that’s really what we’re about: families.”

Ski swaps are a time-honored tradition in Colorado, and families with kids have always been the main buyers.

The earliest recorded ski swap in the country was set up by the Lindley Sporting Goods Store in Steamboat Springs in the 1950s. The swap shop, as it was called, operated seasonally and was “of great benefit to children especially,” the Steamboat Pilot wrote in 1951. Aspen, another early adopter of the ski swap model, also advertised its “Children’s Ski Swaps” at the Aspen School in the late 1950s and 1960s.

In recent years, kids have pushed their parents outdoors at a higher clip than any other group of outdoor participants, according to the most recent Outdoor Participation Trends Report. Two out of three American households with kids participate in outdoor activities, and adults with children ages 6 to 12 saw the largest jump over the past six years, climbing almost 10% since 2019. Growing kids, ages 6 to 12, means lots of gear.

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“I have three sons, I get it, it’s super frustrating,” Speaks said. So how do they make sure they have enough kids’ sizes to go around? “Stress and tears, mostly,” he said.

The Rocky Mountain Ski Swaps team has also made adjustments for Colorado skiers, like adding more backcountry gear to their lineups and expanding their selection of subdisciplines. “You say ‘telemark’ to people in Utah, they are like, ‘what is telemark?’” Speaks said. This year, the team brought in vendors like Black Diamond to bolster their backcountry inventory. Retailers have been a presence at ski swaps since at least the 1990s. At the Rocky Mountain Ski Swaps, they’ll offer discounts ranging from 10% to 60% off market value, Speaks said.

And while families stand to save a lot, a perfect storm of economic uncertainty, tariff turmoil and environmentally conscious consumers has created a huge demand for secondhand gear for all ages. The re-commerce industry has been growing since about 2022, when waves of pandemic-driven outdoors people either ditched their temporary hobbies or committed to them by upgrading their setups. 

Geartrade, one of the largest online secondhand gear markets in the country, expanded its Salt Lake City warehouse by about 6,000 square feet last month to house a 47% increase in year-to-date gross sales volume, on track to outpace the company’s 2025 overall growth rate of 46%. That growth has been driven largely by the ski and snowboard category. The company’s snow sports have broken internal records for four consecutive seasons, including an 80% surge in 2025, according to the trade publication Outdoor Sportswire. 

Whether you’re looking to upgrade, offload or swap sizes, here are more than 20 ski swaps happening around the state in October and November:

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