Park City Locals Defend Against Vail Resorts

As the only town in North American that is home to both an Epic and an Ikon resort, Park City, UT is ground zero in the Vail Resorts vs Alterra ski wars. A few committed locals determined to restore quality of life and manageable traffic levels are battling to hold Park City Mountain accountable to its daily skier capacity limits. This is significant for every community near an Epic or Ikon resort, because if successful, our landmark legal case will establish precedent for ski towns across North America to enforce capacity limits at their own local resorts. This includes the Cottonwoods, Breckenridge, Leavenworth, Stowe, Tahoe, Truckee, Vail, and Whistler.

Back in May 2022, four of us appealed a permit awarded to Park City Mountain for two chairlift upgrades. We aren’t NIMBYs or anti-lift upgrades like Vail Resorts would have passholders and their employees believe. We’re just skiers and residents fed up with resorts growing their bottom lines at our expense.

Vail Resorts/Park City Mountain fudged capacity numbers in their permit application. The Park City Planning Commission upheld our appeal citing zoning laws and public safety. They simultaneously invited Vail Resorts/Park City Mountain to use transparent math and reapply for a new permit to keep the lift upgrade plans moving forward. Park City Mountain cited their commitment to infrastructure improvements and said they would do just that.

But now, almost two years later, a very different picture has emerged and the truth about Vail Resorts motives are crystal clear; they’d rather spend millions of dollars and years fighting four locals in court so they can keep overcrowding resorts than cap skier counts to their legal limits and actually invest in guest experience and employee safety.

At Park City Mountain, enough lifts are regularly breaking down again this season that visitors are complaining, and the mechanic’s union was pressed for a statement. Ironically, none of the broken lifts are the one’s Park City Mountain applied to upgrade. The only people preventing lift upgrades at this point are Vail Resorts and Park City Mountain executives.

Utah’s Third District Court gets it.

The Colorado Sun gets it.

The Salt Lake Tribune gets it.

Vail Resorts refuses to accept it, so they recently appealed AGAIN to Utah’s Supreme Court. Supreme Court remanded the case to the State Appellate Court, so we potentially have two more rounds (Appellate and then Supreme Court) ahead of us in our defense of ski towns against the ski conglomerates commoditizing our communities.

If our case is upheld by Utah’s judicial system, it may topple the mega pass programs Vail Resorts and Alterra created to keep shareholders and investors happy. This could mean a return to 2010 traffic levels where lift lines were just a holiday thing, gridlock was just a big city thing, resorts had enough free parking for skiers and employees alike, and a day passes didn’t cost as much as a hotel room.

Vail Resorts is doing what they do best and trying to run us out of money. We represented ourselves at the Planning Commission level but had to retain a licensed land use attorney (Hyrum Bosserman of Bennett, Tueller, Johnson & Deere) to represent us in court proceedings. We have exhausted our personal funds and need help with our legal fees to keep in the fight.

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