Every ski resort fact box contains the same three numbers, and most of us read them as if they measured the same thing. They do not.
Vertical drop: the only one that sets a limit
Vertical drop is the difference between the highest and lowest point you can ski between. It is the number that actually determines what is physically possible at the resort, because no run can contain more vertical metres than the mountain has.
Åre gives 890 metres of vertical, the largest in Sweden. Trysil, Norway's largest resort, has 685 metres according to Store norske leksikon.
The vertical also decides how a day feels. With 900 metres you can ski a long way without stopping, and your legs give out before the lift does. With 300 metres you ski shorter runs and stand in the lift more often, no matter how many pistes there are.
Altitude: about the snow, not the skiing
The altitude of the summit says almost nothing about the skiing and a great deal about the snow.
It is colder higher up, and a resort with its whole area above a certain level survives a mild spell without losing its base. That is why alpine resorts market their altitude so hard: there the freezing level sits higher than in Scandinavia for large parts of the season.
In the Nordics it works differently. The summit of Åreskutan sits at 1,420 metres, which is low by alpine standards, but the latitude does the work instead. Nordic resorts also tend to sit above or near the tree line already at fairly modest altitude, which is why you ski on open mountain here but in forest in the Alps at the same height.
Piste kilometres: the least useful number
The number of runs and total piste kilometres are the figures used most in marketing and the ones that say least about a day on the hill.
They depend entirely on how you count. A wide slope can be counted as one run or as three. A resort is rebuilt every season. Trysil is a clear example: Store norske leksikon gives 68 runs over 78 kilometres and 31 lifts, while SkiStar gives 69 runs, 81 kilometres and 41 lifts. Both are reasonable; they are simply counting different things.
What is comparable is the longest run. Trysil's longest is 5.4 kilometres, and a figure like that is hard to count creatively.
The numbers that are not in the fact box
Two things often matter more than all three above.
Aspect. Which compass direction the slopes face determines when they go soft in spring and when they are icy in the morning. A north-facing slope holds snow longer, a south-facing one gives sun at lunchtime.
Shelter. If everything sits on open mountain, wind shuts the resort down. If there is lower, wooded terrain as an alternative, it stays skiable anyway.
Neither appears in a fact box, but both are visible immediately in the terrain. That is one of the reasons an elevation relief is more informative than a piste map: the piste map shows what the resort wants to show, the terrain shows what the mountain actually is.
Why we compare terrain instead
When we build a piece, only elevation data is used. No lifts, no pistes, no numbers from a brochure. That means an Åre piece and a Cortina piece are directly comparable: the same kind of data, the same kind of translation, and the height scale held within a narrow band across the whole range.
Hang them next to each other and you see the difference between a Nordic and an alpine valley in a second, without reading a single figure. More on why the shapes differ in the article on Swedish mountain forms.