A message from Park City Mountain

Today, I received a special message from our local ski area that, as you may know, is owned by Vail Resorts. I’ve regularly been a vocal critic of its way of operating and was delighted to hear that after several years and a very rocky winter season (pun intended), the resort operator had finally its “come to Jesus moment”. 

Here's what the message said: 

“Dear Go11, 

As the ski season is coming to an end, we have finally taken the time to review your complaints and decided to do something about them. You had mentioned us not cutting whippers and aspen growths all over your preferred terrain, complained about our slow, fixed-grip chairlifts, our inability to spend more than $15 per hour to staff our mountains, the poor choice we’ve made in upgrading Silverlode to an 8-passenger lift and Eagle to a 6-pack. 

We also heard your criticisms about us playing chicken with the weather and not making enough snow, not grooming runs that ought to be smooth and not bumpy or rocky, and finally for selling too many Epic passes and flooding your mountain with countless skiers and snowboarders. 

Well, we’ve finally understood what you meant through your French-accented remarks, understood your many points and we take the following steps: 

We’ll begin by setting up a whipper and fallen-trees suppressing patrol that will get to work as soon as the snow is all melted. It will shave all that undesired growth and remove the fallen trees wherever you might want to ski. 

You already know that we’ve decided to hike our hiring rate to $20 per hour and since we take your pass money in advance, we’ll pay even more if we have to. We will upgrade those fixed-grip chairs upon which we used to “park” skiers for hours on end, making them all express lifts. 

We’ll move the base of Motherlode further down into the drainage, make it a 6-pack, and extend its top station to the edge of Puma ridge, then cut a run from the now congested Miner Camp / Silverlode area, so skiers can overflow from there to Motherlode. 

Further Motherlode will enable skiers to access Puma ridge, Thaynes and offer a decent access to Jupiter and to its west face. The old Motherlode express-quad will replace the slow Eagle lift. We’ll make snow as early, as thick and as late as we need to, and will no longer pepper our groomed runs with pesky little rocks. 

As for the number of pass we sell, we still have no idea how congested your ski area will be, but crowds might shrink as folks must go back to work, and we promise to send the excess visitors to Andermatt-Sedrun that we just acquired in Switzerland; we’re confident that the local there will be so excited that we’ll never see these Epic pass-holders again!” 

After reading that, I had never been so happy in my life. Wow! You see, I don’t need much to get all excited!