Different folks like Utah's different slopes

If you're cruising around the solid oak restaurant tables, the brass bathroom fixtures and the guys who carry your skis to your complimentary storage locker at Deer Valley this winter, do not be surprised if you see copies of Ski magazine as ubiquitous as Stein Eriksen photographs.

Also, do not be surprised if copies of Skiing magazine are rare.

Ski and Skiing are America's leading publications about all things skiing, exposing themselves to 1.8 million and 1.3 million readers, respectively, every month. Each is filled with photographs and stories of mountains full of powder and people who ski in them and never fall — and then talk about it afterward at a locals hangout called something like "Crazy Johnny's." Each presents skiing as the elixir of life, second only maybe to air.

But there is one glaring difference: their annual rankings of North America's top places to ski.

Take this year's rankings, for instance . . . or, if you happen to be Deer Valley, take one of them.

In Ski's resort rankings, Deer Valley is No. 1, the absolute finest place to ski from Mexico to the Arctic Circle. But in Skiing's rankings, Deer Valley is unranked. It does not exist. It gets as many votes as Utah State in the college football polls.

Conversely, two more Utah resorts, Alta and Snowbird, rank a combined No. 2 in Skiing's list (and No. 1 in America, since Canada's Whistler/Blackcomb is overall No. 1).

But in Ski's rankings, where the two resorts are listed separately, they are also-rans. Snowbird comes in at No. 20 and Alta at No. 29.

In the magazine's respective rankings — Ski lists a top 30 and Skiing a top 25 — no less than 18 resorts are ranked in only one of the lists. (Seven of Utah's 12 resorts, by the way, are ranked in one poll or both; they include, with Ski and Skiing rankings in parentheses: Park City (5, 16), Snowbird (2, 20), The Canyons (14, 24), Alta (2, 29), Snowbasin (NR, 23), Solitude (30, NR) and Deer Valley (1, NR)).

But there is a rhyme to the unreason. It lies in the subjective determination as to just what, exactly, makes a great ski resort. To Ski magazine, with a more mature reader demographic, the criteria is different than for Skiing magazine, with typically a younger audience.