Mystery of vanishing skiers solved

This winter has seen far less visitors on Park City mountain slopes than usual. We all thought it was caused by the current financial situation, when in fact we just learned it was the result of some subterranean phenomenon that is swallowing people from the snow surface and pulling them into the ground. Park City used to be a major silver mining town and its mountainous underground is just like Swiss cheese with more than 1200 miles of tunnels and access shafts.

All became clear this past week when Bruce Rogers from Sun Valley, Idaho was skiing at Deer Valley Resort with a friend. He was skiing powder snow in the trees, when he suddenly stopped to catch his breath and survey the terrain. Suddenly a strange feeling swept all over him. The snow beneath his skis was moving and sucking him into the ground like quicksand. Rogers had stopped over a patch of snow sitting on top of what was the opening of a historic mine tunnel that was not accounted for.

While his companion helped him get unharmed out of the hole, that remarkable event suggests that all the missing skiers of this season probably have been swallowed by the mountain, never to return to the surface. This incident is only the tip of the iceberg and with the understandable ski resorts PR black-out, there are probably thousands of skiers waiting for a “lift” at the bottom of our underground galleries. Unless we find a way to rescue them by this coming November, these folks may never return to feed our local business; so has anyone any good suggestion to extract them from the mountain and pump them back out into our economy?