A nearby ski resort invests to improve...

When all other resorts are tightening their belts and trying to survive the crisis the best they can, one of our three local Park City ski operators, The Canyons, is playing contrarian and will be offering two more high-speed quad chairlifts this season, improving access to its slopes and confirming its stature as the largest ski area in Utah with 4,000 skiable acres. One of the chairs will have a bubble, and even heated-seats, but who frankly cares! As skiers, we're pleased, because it's where we ski and we have long recognized the place's superior terrain and potential. Not just content to offer all these improvements, The Canyons is renaming itself to just “Canyons.”

Another silly move in my opinion and a forth name change in the resort's short life. This “Datsun” to “Nissan” re-christening name is not just dumb, it's costly and confusing. Originally in the seventies, the name of the place was Park City West which was short lived and changed almost immediately to Park West; this name contraction made a lot of sense as it geographically related to Park City, the next-door resort, and built on the “Park” name, more like Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands have been building on their same core destination name. Then, in the nineties, a new owner decided to name it Wolf Mountain before selling it to the flamboyant Les Otten and its American Skiing Company which concocted the more recent name of The Canyons, adding to the confusion with the resorts at Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, commonly called that way, and including Alta, Brighton, Solitude and Snowbird. Today, the new marketing team is changing again to Canyons. Had they been a tad smarter they should have gone – almost – full circle and renamed it Park West, but that would have been far too clever, right?