- Quebec skier visits rise to 6.3 million, second highest in the last 10 years.
- Colorado posts its best season on record with approximately 14 million skier visits.
- Skier visits were higher than the two previous seasons in Vermont.
- Former Jay Peak head Bill Stenger sits down for an interview to share his side of the story before reporting to prison.
- Granite Gorge sells at auction to local investors who plan to reopen.
- Montana Snowbowl’s new triple chair will be extremely steep (6th steepest chairlift in the country by my count.)
- Aspen Mountain begins Pandora’s construction.
- Le Massif joins the Mountain Collective Pass.
- Lost Trail signs on to the Powder Alliance.
- The landlord for Big Snow American Dream remains in deep financial trouble.
- Park City planning commissioners delay deciding on the Silverlode and Eagle lift replacement projects until at least June 15th, leaving a very narrow window for construction if approved.
- The Cascade Skyline Gondola proposal enjoys wide community support compared to a competing ski resort concept.
- Developers of the Big Moose Mountain project present their case to the Maine Land Use Planning Commission.
- Big White will replace 16 cabins on Lara’s Gondola this summer.
- Dodge Ridge and Mountain High owner Karl Kapuscinski would like to add new high speed lifts at both resorts in the next few years.
- The State of West Virginia plans two eight passenger gondolas to replace older systems at Hawks Nest and Pipestem state parks.
Lift Blog 
These Park City delays are getting concerning. I sincerely hope they move ahead with approval for these projects ASAP. Some of these residents, IMO, have forgotten that they live in a resort town.
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It’s like they’re resistant to change even when that change would be beneficial to everyone. I mean, I don’t see how Silverlode 8 is going to affect their property when it’s far from any homes.
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I honestly think they’re finding excuses to try to get Vail to address the parking issue. Silverlode and Eagle were both necessary lifts in major choke points and I see no reason for that to bring in more people. That being said, Park City does need more parking, but it’s not like the town hasn’t had a ski resort since 1963.
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And you’d think these guys would realize “the ski area was there long before you were”.
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The residents are not the root cause of this problem.
Vail Resorts could have prioritized its relationships with its communities, funded affordable housing, improved transit networks, and fairly paid its employees. It could have done more just to be visible and seen as a “good neighbor” with the community, even without making big community investments. Instead, Vail spent a decade pursuing a one-size-fits-all, shareholder-driven, “our way or the highway” approach.
This would not be happening, for example, if PCMR were still owned by Powdr, or if it were owned by any other more community-minded company.
Vail spent a decade squandering goodwill. It’s going to take time for the apparently more STAKEholder driven approach which has been adopted in the past four months to bear fruit. Unfortunately, the lift projects at PCMR might end up being the price Vail pays.
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This absolutely would still be happening even if Powdr was still running PCMR simply because of the NIMBYism skitheeast is talking about.
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POWDR did very little to help develop the resort between the time they installed Crescent and then selling off. Vail had to pour money into deferred maintenance.
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And yet no one hated Ian Cumming like they hate Rob Katz.
Sometimes it really is just as simple as a company being a terrible corporate citizen.
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I don’t think this is necessarily VMR’s fault. It’s endemic to any resort community to fight development. The decades long battles between Aspen Skico and the local villagers could fill several libraries. People are going to complain about any change that threatens to impact their perceived life quality or property values even if the project fills the local cash registers. VMR will eventually prevail in PC. The only question is how much they will have to pay in mitigation.
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Vail, and the rest of the ski industry, have to realize that local politics will only hurt them. They are fundamentally real estate developers, and local voters have been empowered and incentivized to block as much new development as possible over the past fifty or so years in this country. Whether it is a terrain expansion at Aspen, affordable housing at Vail, or lift replacements at Park City, getting the local town involved has never helped the process. This NIMBYism cannot be successfully combated at the local level, and Vail should be inspired by Dakota Pacific and other developers to seek legislative change at higher levels of government, such as the state, to overrule local decisions.
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Wait. You think it’s good to ignore what locals want and need? You think Vail’s profits should outweigh livable places?
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In this case, absolutely. The new lifts will not make Park City any less livable. Local residents are incentivized to block as much development as possible, and a growing city needs development, so what residents want is often the exact opposite of what is good for society as a whole. In this case, residents are actually upset with increased car traffic and fewer available parking spots. Modern urban planning has proven that the best way to combat this would be by removing incentives to drive to the mountain base. This can be done by drastically expanding the bed base within walking or transit distance of the mountain base or by removing the massive, free parking lot and having those who do drive park elsewhere and shuttle over. However, whenever proposals are presented to do some combinated of those two ideas, Park City locals are furious and protest them to no end.
This is not about Vail’s profits. This is about NIMBYism perpetuating inequity.
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What the locals want is less important than what PCMR wants.
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Wow. I usually kinda just push peoples buttons and hide behind Gen-X irony, but in this case, I won’t. Giving corporations consideration before individual humans is utterly offensive to me. I know I’m defending some rich folks in this specific argument, but there are many people in PC who are not well off and who will eventually or sooner get pushed out by Vail.
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No one will be pushed out of PC by Vail. What will happen is the demand for recreational/investment property will drive prices out of reach for many. Nothing to do with Vail. Look at any of the bigger resort towns. They’re all the same. The problem here is everyone decided to drive they’re own car to PC last winter with the resulting traffic problems. The NIMBY’s are trying to hold Vail to ransom hoping they’ll fix it. Except the problem primarily lies with the town of PC, and only peripherally with Vail.
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Mountain towns are incredibly varied and complex, and the relationship between those of us who live in them and tourists is equally so. We are all having the conversation about how to adapt our places for the future, with different ideas, policies, and results coming forward. Each town has their own specific struggles and their own way of interacting with the common struggles. To reduce that to, “I bring you money, shut up” is disrespectful to put it lightly. Especially from an outsider. You fly in and spend a week here, we spend our lives in these communities. Please keep that mind.
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Okay, there are two of you (at least) who clearly don’t live in a resort town. While it may be fun to play Sim City with possible lift builds and trail redesigns, saying that the resort company’s needs outweigh the community’s is taking very little into account. This is actual real life we’re talking about here. Things here are vastly more complex than ‘they need to build this lift to make my experience better’. When a resort company’s ideas and plans begin to contradict what the folks who live there want, there’s a problem. I fully understand there’s some NIMBYism here (there is in my quasi-resort town as well) but that shouldn’t mean that all local concerns should be dismissed out of hand.
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A pox on both your houses. But, to SkiTheEast’s point, I agree state and federal decision-making should be way more involved.
Vail’s primary interests are driving pass sales (often beyond comfortable carrying capacity, especially in light of staffing issues), and driving up demand for on-mountain lodging, rentals and lessons. None of these interests have much to do with the local community (or the traffic situation, or frankly the on-mountain experience).
But local residents are hardly saints here. Property owners tend to block new development at all costs, regardless of merit. They don’t want any new supply of housing. They don’t want construction or commercial development anywhere near them. They will develop a mysterious, deep interest in big horn sheep migration patterns if you so much as whisper “employee housing”. And some of this aversion to growth and change (though not all) is likewise shared by renters and mountain employees (who above all, want powder to themselves).
Day trippers want free parking and more highway lanes (neither conducive to a thriving mountain community nor a healthy planet). And fly-in guests want cheap beds, tickets, and food (regardless of who gets displaced or how low the salary of the imported temp employees are).
If anyone’s incentives are _somewhat_ close to objective in this situation, it’s the broader regional government. They want to continue to promote and develop skiing in Utah as a draw to both tourists and residents of the broader Salt Lake City area (which is rapidly growing, and a draw for young families and professionals). To do this, they need both world-class skiing and friendly mountain towns with beds and restaurants and good vibes. They also need sustainable development (because they need snow, water, scenic landscapes, and low wildfire risk).
FWIW, I don’t understand why Vail is not trying to lean into the Canyons side of the resort as a portal for day trip skiers. It’s closer to the metro area, is not within a street grid sort of town, and seems to have ample room for parking. Rather than building “Over and Out” it would have been a more transformative investment to build a gondola replacing the Cabriolet, Over and Out, and maybe Timberline, with stops at the parking area, Canyons Base, Tombstone, and Iron Mountain (basically a Breck Connect for Park City). This could come with new hotels at the final two stops.
There should also be incentives (both carrot and stick) for Vail to build a high-density parking structure at the base of the Cabriolet and use some of the freed-up surface lot land to try and develop a town center in the Canyons environs. This should come with a mix of affordable and market-rate housing and ground-floor retail, to supplement all the McMansion cul de sacs developed on that side of the resort (that likewise create more traffic into Park City’s town center).
Finally, the state or counties could help develop express bus routes between parking areas in SLC and the mountains, taking traffic not only out of summit county but also off I-80. The current bus system seems to require transfers at Kimball Junction (hard to pull people out of cars when doing so requires *multiple* bus rides).
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@Munier Salem: “But local residents are hardly saints here. Property owners tend to block new development at all costs, regardless of merit. They don’t want any new supply of housing. They don’t want construction or commercial development anywhere near them. They will develop a mysterious, deep interest in big horn sheep migration patterns if you so much as whisper “employee housing”.
Yeah, that’s what’s going on with regards to Vail Mountain trying to build very necessary employee housing. To the point of the Vail Mountain Twitter page having to bring it up:
“Vail’s primary interests are driving pass sales (often beyond comfortable carrying capacity, especially in light of staffing issues), and driving up demand for on-mountain lodging, rentals and lessons. None of these interests have much to do with the local community (or the traffic situation, or frankly the on-mountain experience).” Which does make it feel to some degree like the locals are taking it out on the wrong people.
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Just to clarify I have skied at Canyons since 2006 and the combined resort since 2015. I’ve lived in Utah for some time now and my family has been driven out of Park City due to resort town real estate pricing. But what really gets me is some of these people that buy a condo in close proximity to a ski lift and then complain about the noise it generates and grind gears in public. What sacrifices are you going to make to live in such a place? You bought ski-in ski-out in a resort village! Of course there will be noise!
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Honestly, these people remind me of the kinds of people who move into a house next to a busy airport that’s been there for decades and complain about noise, or move into a house next to a busy railroad crossing where trains blow their horns. I’m always like, “The airport/railroad was there first. You chose to move there knowing this, so really, you forfeited your right to complain.”
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What are the other steep chairlifts?
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1. Headwaters at Big Sky
2. Scott at Palisades Tahoe
3. Kachina at Taos
4. Chair 5 at Mt. Baker
5. Deep Temerity at Aspen Highlands
6. (Montana Snowbowl new lift)
7. Chair 1 at Mt. Waterman
8. Seventh Heaven at Stevens Pass
9. Stairway at Sundance
10. Grizzly at Bear Valley
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Chair 23 Mammoth
Chair 10 Kirkwood
Olympic Lady Palisades Tahoe
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As a Utah local, I could be reading this situation wrong, but I really think the vail appeals for the new lifts at Park City is really a way to “stick it to vail” more than NIMBYISM. I cannot tell you how bad the resort was ran this past year. Some lifts never opened. The snowmaking was non existent. And the grooming was lackluster. There were runs that are normally groomed that were never touched.
I see this as a “vail screwed us, so let’s screw them.” I could be wrong but this is the idea I’m getting.
I really feel that if POWDR or another local company still owned them, they might not have had these appeals happen.
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A lot of the issues PCMR was dealing with were issues that weren’t unique to them, or Vail Resorts, or the ski industry. As someone was noting on another thread, lifts not running due to staffing shortages was also true at non-Vail Resorts owned mountains.
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I’m sure it is too late now but a better project at PCMR would have been to extend the quicksilver gondola to unload near the top of Silverlode to enable more lift options and not overload Silverlode, leave Silverlode as is and replace Pioneer instead of Eagle. Last season Eagle did not run due to staffing and the snow on the lower mountain was so poor it didn’t seem like anyone missed it. The terrain served by Pioneer is centrally located and has good variety and snow retention. Pioneer is also a significantly older lift than the Eagles and Silverlode seems a little young to go to the scrap yard. I have not agreed with Vail on some of their lift decisions lately. 😕
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Pioneer would probably work as a high speed quad.
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I am typically one to support having community input on large projects. However, I have no sympathy for the concerns raised by the locals in this particular case. The lifts are all on land owned or leased by Vail. They’re proposed to be built within the existing footprint of the resort which already has like 40 operating lifts. Any environmental concerns are moot for this reason. These projects are also 100% privately financed. Taxpayers aren’t being asked to chip in anything. All they’re trying to do is stick it to Vail as retribution for past grievances. It’s counterproductive because it’s just going to delay the projects, resulting in longer lift lines and a worse ski experience in the interim.
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Exactly. Silverlode is in the middle of the mountain, and no one’s going to be displaced by Eagle.
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Park City locals think that Vail is doing this to their mountain
In all reality, Park City desperately needs these lifts to help traffic flow on the mountain and the lift is also on land leased by Vail, not the homeowners land. Also, if you live in a resort community you should expect there are on mountain improvements.
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Park city hasn’t been their mountain since they removed the gondola. I say full send ahead put up a 8 and 6 pack gets people out of the cottonwoods. Lots of good memories up here but their is nothing reminiscent of those day beside a couple concrete foundation and chairs. With exception of the lifts built before 1995.
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There are days we sometimes wish chairs were that size. 🤣😂
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