A solution to lessen Epic & Ikon’s impacts

Ask anyone living in a ski town where the lifts are owned or associated to Alterra and Vail Resorts and you hear how the local population has been negatively affected by the invasion of pass-holders usually skiing at their own mountain. 

The multi-resorts Epic and Ikon passes looked like good ideas at first, but have developed scores of unintended consequences by bringing huge numbers of skiers and traffic into ski towns like Park City, altering negatively the lives of its residents, regular visitors, skiers and snowboarder without bringing commensurate benefits to the community, as many of these people make very limited use of services offered by Park City (lodging and restaurant among others) while impacting both heavily and negatively the quality of the experience and life of the rest of us. 

 

This goes for any resort owned or participating in the ski-passes created by Vail Resorts and Alterra. First, there’s the carbon footprint story, on the one hand, Vail Resorts promises to achieve zero net emissions by 2030 by doubling down on energy efficiency, purchasing 100 percent renewable energy and investing in programs such as tree planting. Alterra isn’t as bold with its commitment and only has generalities to share: “We recognize and own the responsibility to develop and nurture initiatives that protect and expand access to the mountains. Our industry’s longevity and expansion depend on these efforts, and I have full confidence in this talented team leading the charge.” 

 

Yet, on the other hand, in spite of their nice environmental talk both companies’ multi-pass program promotes more car usage through North America, not too mention mention gridlock in ski towns defeating their respective environmental pledges. In fact, the “band-aid solution” would be to add more parking space, when in fact we should limit the number of vehicles that don’t contribute to the ski town’s economy. 

 

That problem might seem unsolvable, but yet could be addressed very simply by having both Vail Resorts and Alterra offer full and restricted passes (blacked-out in some versions if they choose) for one specific resort at a price slightly below their current passes and then offer multi-resorts passes a significantly higher prices to weed-out casual visitors on strict budget that typically don’t contribute much to compensating the community they invade in their discovery process. 

 

There might be ways also both both Epic and Ikon passes to contribute through these higher priced passes to in an effort to compensate destination towns that are impacted by the extra traffic. 

 

At any rate, ALL impacted communities, like Park City, need to organize together, and must find ways to convince the two operators to limit the multi-resorts passes they sell and by so doing, put the brakes on trivial travel that contributes to huge lift line, air pollution, gridlock, pot-holes and parking shortages and remediation, but fails to pay for the damages they create.