Ski-mageddon

What’s ski-magedoon? Sounds like Armageddon, right? Just in case, Armageddon, /ˌärməˈɡedn/, in the New Testament, is the last battle between good and evil before Judgment Day.

Pretty crazy stuff, right? This is exactly what happened in Park City this past weekend. It all started on Friday.

The weather was bad, snow, strong wind, lots of chairlifts were on wind-hold, and with it, surprisingly, tons of people, lines like I had never seen before and no good reasons for it.

On Saturday, as we went out on our morning walk, the effervescence was palpable. Enormous traffic, swarms of skiers waiting for public transportation like we’d never seen before. In spite of that, we went out to ski at 12:30 pm.

The traffic was horrendous. At the resort, we had a hard time finding a parking spot and the number of skiers was just overwhelming. I thought to myself, this is the end of Park City! We’ve been invaded and still no reason for it, at least that what it appeared.

We picked a quiet spot on the mountain and some difficult runs where no one usually gets to, and in spite of that, it was quite busy.

As we were riding the lift, we found out that Big and Little Cottonwood had been closed for the past two days and that all these extra skiers were normally skiing in Alta, Snowbird, Brighton and Solitude.

These four resorts represent about 38% of Utah’s entire lift capacity (Park City Mountain and Deer Valley represent another 44%). So we probably got 12 to 15,000 extra skiers that weekend.

When I heard that it spelled relief to me and I realized that the end of the world and not quite arrived yet!