More Dogs on Main

All season long, the changes at the Canyons have been in the news. Last fall they said they were going to scrape off the base area and start over again. This would be the third or fourth try at getting it right. It sounded way too ambitious. But somewhere along the way, they dropped a bomb and rearranged the whole place. I’ve been anxious to see how it worked, and finally got over there recently.

Wow.

The base of the gondola is now where the base of the gondola always should have been. You get off the parking-lot lift and there it is. I think the original placement had something to do with making you walk past a bunch of retail shops that didn’t get built. But it was a hike, and when you got there, the gondola line backed up half way down the plaza. Now it’s right where it should have been in the first place.

At the other end of the plaza, the orange bubble lift runs more or less along the former gondola alignment but takes you higher up the mountain. It shouldn’t be as prone to wind holds, either. If your destination is the old side of the resort, the bubble chair puts you right there. The reports are that on the busiest day of the Christmas holiday week, the lines at the base were about 15 minutes at the very peak. That’s reasonable for holiday traffic. I was there on a slow, Sundance-impacted ski day, and there was no line at either one.

The orange bubble chair is heated, and the bubble is very orange. I was there on a sunny day, so neither of these accessories from the Lexus dealer seemed all that important, but I can imagine on a cold or windy day that the long bubble ride would be very comfortable.

The biggest change at the base isn’t what they built, but what they tore down. The old 1968 day lodge a plywood palace that felt fragile the day it opened is gone. It blocked the view of the mountain from the newer base area, and cast a shadow over the plaza in front of the big hotel. With it gone, the ski hill comes down to meet the plaza, the sun shines on some very cool beach chairs. It feels and looks like a ski resort at the base.

A new restaurant up in the newer part of the resort solves a whole list of problems. Cloud Dine is a temporary tent-type structure that provides about 150 restaurant seats and restrooms. The far reaches of the resort take some effort to get to, and before this was built, it always seemed that about the time you got there, somebody needed to head back in search of a bathroom or food.

Cloud Dine has a cool Caribbean beach feel to it, stunning views from a nice deck, and an interesting menu. The building probably wasn’t cheap, though it had to cost a fraction of what the permanent day lodge will ultimately cost. It will solve the problems for a few years, and does it with style.

I used to ski the old ParkWest all the time in high school and college. It was cheap a student season pass was $80. There was some fun terrain, and it was easier to get to than Alta. But even by the relatively primitive standards of the early 1970s, ParkWest was a low-budget operation. Nobody did much grooming or snow making then, but ParkWest basically didn’t do any. Food service was scary in the sense that the grill seemed more likely to set fire to the building than the hotdog. One restaurant was called Botulism Bob’s. Every time the lift stopped, there was a very real chance that the power company had pulled the meter and shut things down. It was duct tape and bailing wire all the way.

The resort has gone through a series of owners, each of whom has tried to make big improvements, but mostly got mired correcting the deferred maintenance they inherited. There was great hope when American Skiing Company bought it. Instead, it seemed to initiate their corporate death spiral. It seemed like every time “West Wolf Canyon” would reach the brink of success, the fractious ownership would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They appear to have spent more money on lawyers than lifts through the years. The ghost of the old ParkWest days still haunted the place.

But this time feels different. If, like me, you’ve been a Canyons skeptic based on 40 years of pretty good reasons to be skeptical, it’s time to give it another chance. I think they got it right this time.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column for nearly 25 years.