Park City needs access to Big Cottonwood Canyon

As I've said before, early season comes with its endless anguish about snow cover, not just on opening day, but throughout the ski season.

Last week, Park City decided to postpone its opening by six days, because it couldn't make enough snow, given the prevailing balmy temperatures. You see, Park City sits fairly low at 6,900 feet (2 103 meters) while Deer Valley's base is just at 7,200 feet (2 195 meters).

Compared to the other nearby Utah resorts, this is quite low and certainly even lower than most Colorado's ski areas situated under about the same latitude. Beside being higher up, Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons receive also more snow than the so-called Wasatch Back (Park City & Deer Valley) because they face and block most of the eastbound precipitations and also benefit positively from lake effect conditions.

Yet, Park City is where the action is, where the good restaurant are, where the après-ski happens and a massive lodging capacity is ready to make its guests welcome. We just could say the opposite about Alta, Brighton, Snowbird and Solitude.

Add to the equation the fact that our climate is fast becoming much warmer than anyone ever predicted, we have a “perfect storm” of sorts in which Park City needs to access at least its Big Cottonwood Canyon neighbor to the south in order to enjoy better and greater amounts of snow from season's beginning to end.

The good news is that it would work perfectly as Park City Mountain and Brighton are, technically speaking, bordering each other and it would just require two ski-lifts to join them. In addition Brighton is already interconnected with its neighbor Solitude to the West and the whole canyon, by also serving Park City skiers would finally gain its development potential that's currently impossible to reach with its lack of visitor “pillows”.

The bad news, or the challenge if we look at it positively, is that Park City Mountain should make an agreement with at least Brighton and ideally, Solitude too, to interconnect, or better yet purchase the two entities. This would be a terrific insurance policy against climate change!