Park City Locals Defend Against Vail Resorts

December 2024 update: It's been 2.5 years and Vail Resorts is STILL fighting to overturn this in court. We are slogging through appeals court where we are expected to win again. After that comes Supreme Court. In this time, Park City Mountain hasn't applied to upgrade so much as a toiled at the resort, and that's because they'd rather try to bankrupt our effort and keep their numbers secret than comply with the law and deliver a fully functional resort experience.

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, and the permit application was the Trojan Horse we used to prove Vail's/Park City Mountain's noncompliance.

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, lifts regularly break down, and the mechanic’s union was pressed for a statement last season on the matter. Ironically, none of the broken lifts last year or this year 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 we are currently defending our town and our Planning Commission before the Utah Court of Appeals.

If we can hold this case to the end of the legal line, then we can restore normal traffic on ski hills and roadways and we can get our resorts and towns back. The mega pass model will go away, season passes will be reserved for locals, and day lift ticket prices will return to reasonable rates. And paid parking and reservations won't be necessary, because lots already have sufficient capacity for the allowed number of skiers at each resort.

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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