Park City Mountain resort announced it is going to build a new 10-passenger gondola at the Canyons Village area. It replaces the Sunrise double chair that doesn’t go anywhere, and will be extended to take people from the base to the Red Pine Lodge area. For all practical purposes, Red Pine is the functional base of the Canyons side of things. Getting the morning crush from the village and parking lot up to Red Pine has been a problem for years, and with the growing skier traffic, it’s only getting worse. There are days when you get off the cabriolet and are already in the line for the Orange Bubble chair.
I’m kind of skeptical about a 10-passenger gondola. Between the time spent getting that many people in and out of the thing, and wind holds on the existing, more or less parallel, gondola, I wonder if a high speed six-seater might have been a better solution. The eight-seater the resort bought to replace Silverlode could have gone there. That lift ended up getting shipped to Whistler after the city approval process derailed. But people more knowledgeable than me made the decision.
The lift is projected to cost a jaw dropping $27 million. That’s about a million cheeseburgers. Of that, $9 million will come from the Canyons Village Management Association, sort of a master HOA covering all the commercial and lodging at the Canyons base area. Improving access to the mountain is clearly a big benefit to them.
You won’t find 10-passenger gondolas in the ski lift aisle at Home Depot. There’s a good bit of engineering to be done, and then the manufacturing before installation. The deal says it has to be installed and operational within three years of getting the necessary approvals from Summit County. So don’t count on it for next season.
Still, the investment is good news. Something has to be done to solve the long lines at the base of the mountain. Both the Park City and Canyons sides of the resort can spread people out pretty well once they get up the mountain. But the morning crush is a terrible experience.
It will be interesting to see how Summit County processes it. The city made a complete mess of the proposal to replace the Eagle lift at the Park City base a couple of years ago. I was no fan of the proposed hotel project to be built on top of the parking lots. Parking is a nightmare, and once the air rights above the parking lots are sold off, it’s impossible to build more parking. The hotel project couldn’t go forward without knowing what the parking obligation was, and the parking obligation couldn’t be defined until the city decided whether the upgraded Eagle and Silverlode lifts increased skier capacity. If they did, the code mandated more parking. The resort’s argument was that the lifts better managed the existing skiers, but didn’t really bring in more.
But there are a lot more, with or without the new lifts.
A citizens group appealed the city’s initial decision, saying more lift capacity was more lift capacity. And that required more parking. The combined hotel and lift proposals languished in planning purgatory until the developer abandoned the option on the parking lots and Vail shipped the lifts off to Canada. It’s maybe unrelated, but the paper towel dispenser in Legacy Lodge that fell off the wall before Christmas was never replaced. If the city couldn’t figure out how to approve the upgrades, Vail Resorts would spend its money somewhere else.
Ever since the two resorts were consolidated, the split planning jurisdiction has been a problem. The city and county have different codes, different definitions, and different approvals that have been in place over many years. The resort advertises there is “only one Park City,” but there remain two unconnected planning jurisdictions. That invites the resort to shop for the most favorable planning approvals and inevitably puts the city and county in competition rather than having a consistent, unified approach to the biggest business in the region.
Between the paid parking system in town, and now the significant new investment at the Canyons side of things, the “front door” of the Park City resort is moving out of Park City. As more of the skiers approach the mountain from Canyons Village, it will change things in town. If it reduces skier numbers on the Park City side, as a local skier, I’m all for it. If I owned a shop at the base of the resort, or a business on Main Street, I might look at the demotion a little differently. If access to the mountain is substantially better at the Canyons, and more people stay in the lodging there (and there still is a mountain of development yet to be built), business in town may suffer. Guests staying at the Canyons may venture into Main Street once or twice during their stay, but dinner at Canyons Village or Kimball Junction might be a lot more convenient.
City sales taxes go down. And suddenly, city residents have to pay for $30 million in pickleball bonds themselves instead of getting the visitors to subsidize everything. It’s all connected. The new investment is generally a good thing, but City Hall ought to be a bit concerned about getting left behind on this one.