Last week, I had tried to figure out if the new lifts from the Mayflower side of Deer Valley would be operating this season, making the 500-car parking lot the location of choice to avoid driving into town, and came up empty.
As luck would have it, the day after submitting my column, Deer Valley announced that the new Keetley Express, a six-pack bubble chair lift, will be open this coming season.
They are targeting December, but have a lot to do, and we all know how construction schedules go. But that’s the plan. The Keetley Express, a shuttle from the new parking lot, ski storage, and sort of everything we’ve come to expect from Deer Valley at the new base, even if some of it is located in temporary facilities.
The Keetley lift will take skiers to the Sultan Nose, where Stein’s Way splits to either the Mayflower or Sultan lifts. From Sultan, you are into the thick of things. It’s an easy run to Quincy and then Empire or Perseverance Bowl first thing in the morning can be just fine.
The parking lot isn’t right at the bottom of the lift, so there is a shuttle to deal with. But compared to the 45-minute crawl into town on 248, or the Richardson Flat bus, it looks like the way to go.
It will make the morning meet-up with friends even more complicated. They are coming from all over — Kimball, Silver Creek, Old Town and various locations in Park City. Carpooling has been challenging because nobody is on the same route. We’ve ended up combining into fewer cars at different locations, but the idea that we will all be at Snow Park ready to ski at 9 has become aspirational. How starting from the East Pillage side of things fits into the mix will have to be worked out.
Driving over to the Jordanelle side, I won’t go through Kamas, which creates a doughnut drought. Between my house and the base of the Keetley lift, there’s not so much as a vending machine, let alone Chevron-quality doughnuts. Breakfast on the road will become a lot more complicated.
Driving in on 248 in the morning traffic jam, there was ample time for a four-course meal. So there will be some logistical challenges. But if I don’t have to leave an hour early, a civilized breakfast at home is plausible.
I don’t know how invested Deer Valley is in the East Village name. There was really nothing wrong with Mayflower, a name that had been in use for that area for over a hundred years. I guess it’s a geographical anachronism, causing people to wonder what Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims are doing out West. So it takes some explanation.
The alternative, however, is equally anachronistic, referencing a neighborhood in New York City that is equally out of place here. I suppose Mayflower also has the baggage of the European conquest of indigenous people, though I don’t think that’s why it got dropped.
Anyway, if they are determined to abandon Mayflower, historically accurate and awkward as it is, there’s still time to come up with something more interesting than East Village before it gets too ingrained in marketing to change. It’s so generic and boring. Now’s the time.
There’s nothing wrong with Keetley, the town that is now under the reservoir and also the railroad siding that served the Mayflower and other mines. Pocatello Gulch has a rough-and-tumble Old West mining vibe to it.
There’s Glencoe Canyon, to use another existing geographic feature. Or Hailstone, another settlement (not ever quite big enough to be a town) that was more or less under the dam. It was sometimes called Elk Horn, which has some appeal, too. East Village just sounds like a shopping mall in Orem.
I watched the presidential debate. I don’t know why. There’s no question about how I’m going to vote, and nothing that happened or could have happened in the debate was going to change that.
I guess I was hoping for confirmation that Harris is up to the job. She’s still largely unknown, and while not being Trump is more than enough qualification for me, it was good to see that she seems capable.
I guess I had higher expectations for Trump, but it only took him 31 minutes to descend to “immigrants eating dogs and cats” level of incoherence. He couldn’t answer a pretty direct question on abortion rights, couldn’t explain his plan for mass deportation of those pet-eating immigrants who have been in the country for a generation, apparently keeping their dietary habits secret all this time.
In other words, he was himself, still insisting that he won the last election (which constitutionally would make him ineligible to run again).
I don’t know any “undecided” voters. I know lots of people who are firmly dug in on one side or the other, or completely repulsed by the whole thing. Nothing in the debate will have changed any minds.
Maybe in the deep woods of central Pennsylvania or northern Michigan there were some undecided people just tuning in for the first time in four years. but likely just confirmed where people were already.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.