Park City Mountain’s poor grooming and bad maintenance?

On Tuesday, I convinced my wife to go skiing. It was a cold but beautiful day and the big reason for her to go was that the mountain was now crowd-free after the holidays. 

We had a good few runs until we started noticing that many of the ski trails weren’t groomed as they normally are, with big bumps, slippery patches here and there, even on gentler slopes. This was far from being what we had experienced for the last twenty years, at least. 

One could have argued that there was little man-made snow and, as a result, regular grooming by snow cat becomes more difficult. We had started at Park City Mountain (PCM) and moved over to the Canyons side of the mountain. 

Since grooming was so bad on the regular runs, we followed the main circulation arteries that were kept smooth enough, had a great run on Boa’s powder (the Condor lift had opened that day) and when it was time to return back to PCM, we thought we’d jump on the “Orange Bubble” chair, but it was stopped. 

We turned around, walked to the gondola instead when the chairlift started again, so we went there, loaded it and stopped shortly thereafter for a long time, then it sputtered again and, nothing, it just stopped. 

Long minutes went by, and we soon realized we wouldn’t make it back to our car as the QuickSilver gondola would be closed. 

Once more the chairlift moved, but backwards (scarry!) and stopped again until the operators decided to use the backup engine to empty the line.

After unloading at the mid-station, we skied down to the bus stop and waited for our transportation back to Park City that would get us back to the parking lot and our car. 

Morality, slopes and lift maintenance could also need some help at our local Vail Resorts ski area and this doesn’t bode well for our future skiing enjoyment...