So, Park City Mountain’s first bid four years ago for sensible lift upgrades to bleed down long lines and disperse skiers sooner across America’s largest lift-served resort went through a single planning director for approval before opponents raised a fuss and the full Planning Commission then rejected it. And then … the courts.
The second bid this year for Park City Mountain’s Silverlode and Eagle lift upgrades properly went through the Planning Commission for approval before appellants hope a single administrative hearing officer rejects it on Thursday. Or the officer approves it, again. And then … the courts.
Wait what? I’m getting dizzy here. Is this some weird déjà vu or what? Same bid, same gantlet if in a different order, same result?
This isn’t the fault of the city. Not the fault of Park City Mountain’s leaders or their overlords at Vail Resorts. Not the fault of the ski community at large, which largely gets it. On lift rides, in long lines, at the bar, events, chit chatting, they tell me. Their consensus? The opposition to upgrading these lifts is ridiculous. Probably why we can count them up on one hand.
This years-long hamstringing comes down to a handful of lay people with maybe too much time and discretionary income available to gum up good sense and the wishes of virtually everyone else in the community.
First it was over nonsense about parking spaces — none would be added, no need — and fear that lifts doing a better job of dispersing skiers into the heart of the mountain would create demand for yet more skiers to flock to Park City.
Then their reasoning mutated into the notion that better lifts will only mean more skiers clogging the runs back down, ignoring the obvious fact that there are more choices than that once up on the mountain. Which, um, was kind of the whole point of the upgrades. To reduce the congestion the litigants would only continue if they get their way.
Whether judges continue to follow along such peanut gallery logic through the tea leaves of an archaic development agreement and find the letter of the law at odds with real life and good sense, well, we’ll see.
So five, six people don’t want Park City Mountain to upgrade the part of the resort in Park City. Meantime, the resort has added a full gondola on the Canyons side outside the city jurisdiction with more reasonable local government review and the wishes of the fuller public.
The wonder is that Park City Mountain bothers trying a thing in Park City proper at this point.
But ski lifts have been improving since rope tows operated off pickup trucks. Mostly, that’s opened more of a mountain rather than everyone skiing straight down the way they came up. They’re not really lemmings despite what you might think of their fashion choices.
Scratch a little and soon you’ll find that the anti-upgrade handful of opponents doesn’t really care about parking or the silly new argument about better service in dispersal only means skiers clogging the runs back down.
Those are finger-in-the-wind, spaghetti-on-the-wall, yeah-that’s-the-ticket reasoning on the fly.
What they care about is crowding on Park City Mountain. They have a point there, even if fighting so hard against one of the solutions.
They also have a fixation with the proprietary calculation Park City Mountain in particular uses for Comfortable Carrying Capacity, or CCC, a wide practice among the ski hills. Like you can’t tell immediately when a mountain is overcrowded. Like Park City Mountain frequently is.
Such a subjective observation is subjected to a cool number as if that makes such a thing objective. The calculation is — as more than one insider has explained to me, generally with an eye roll — utter BS at root.
Seeking to learn it through litigation is silly, then. There is no point other than running everyone through some labyrinth full of artificial reasoning to reach a meaningless calculation that leads to a meaningless number which no resort bothers following anyway. Because managers know it’s, um, meaningless.
Crowded is crowded. Too crowded, well, that’s like obscenity. Even a U.S. Supreme Court justice couldn’t pin that down further from “I know it when I see it.”
It’s obvious that Park City Mountain lets way too many skiers on the hill during peak periods. An inconvenient truth is that even so, if you ask in one of those endless lift lines, most vacationers will tell you they still are having a great time. I know. We’ve asked, including during the nadir of the ski patrol strike.
As a local, I found my way on ski hills away from crowds — first chair on weekdays, up the main chairs and in and back, done when the crowds pick up in late morning. As my snowboarding became more of a mind over knee exercise, I did find myself weary of the lines and general clutter at Park City Mountain and last (non)season even at Snowbasin.
Both had exceeded my personal CCC, though I don’t feel a need to sue. I can easily enough go somewhere else. And they should be able to do what they need to do to improve the experience, and maybe win me back.
So I’m a hard thanks but no thanks to the litigious handful, who after all have only managed to gum the lift upgrades up for years now. For all their effort and expense, it’s not like they’ve helped anything. Or would.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.