By Heather Burke, Boston.com Correspondent

December 11, 2014

It’s an amazing alpine experience, skiing from town to town and valley to valley in Europe’s Alps, and there is nothing like it in the US… yet. I have my eye on Utah as the chess pieces are moving into place and ski mountain mergers and acquisitions make way.

This fall, Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort was bought by Vail Resorts for $182.5 million, following a long heated court battle over PCMR’s inadvertent unpaid land lease. So Vail Resorts now owns Park City and neighboring Canyons in Utah, and just announced $50 million in improvements including a gondola to connect Park City to The Canyons next season. Also, Deer Valley Resort announced it will purchase Solitude Mountain Resort and begin operating that ski resort in May of 2015.

What makes these mergers more interesting is that for decades Ski Utah and seven Utah ski resorts have been working to interconnect for a One Wasatch ski experience between Deer Valley, Park City Mountain Resort and The Canyons, Brighton, Solitude, Alta, and Snowbird. With the addition of two or three lifts, Utah could offer skiers the largest lift-served ski experience in North America, with 18,000 acres, 100 lifts and 750 trails. Compare that to Vail Colorado at 5,300, Big Sky Montana at 5,750, and Whistler/Blackcomb British Columbia at 8,000 acres.

Two of six new connector lifts currently being proposed are from Park City Mountain Resort to Brighton, and Solitude to Alta. Already Snowbird and Alta are interconnected, Solitude and Brighton are as well. Deer Valley abuts Park City which borders The Canyons, these two newly-joined sister resorts will be connected next season.

What complicates the One Wasatch proposed interconnect is that environmentalists are concerned for the impact to the natural habitat of any proposed lifts or increased skier traffic. Backcountry skiers already ski this terrain, and surely some want it to remain as is. Another complication, two of the seven ski resorts, Deer Valley and Alta, do not allow snowboarders. Also each of these ski resorts has its own unique feel, and some fear connecting could homogenize the ski experience. I have skied them all and each warrants at least a week (more like a month) to explore. Skiing them all in a day would garner you a few runs at each, hardly doing them justice — but a cool alpine ski experience all the same.

Ski Utah surveyed 35,000 people, and 73 percent responded that One Wasatch was “a somewhat or very good idea.” Ski Utah also revealed in September this conceptual plan of lifts and trails connecting the seven ski resorts in One Wasatch.

It currently takes 41.5 miles to drive from Snowbird to Park City. The skiing distance would be 9 miles. That’s not to imply that the ski connect is designed to reduce ski commuter traffic, just an interesting factoid on the proximity of these ski mountains. More trivia: The Wasatch National Forest comprises over 2.4 million acres, with just 6,743 acres currently leased for commercial skiing – that’s .27 percent, for perspective. The proposed lifts would be entirely privately funded, and would involve another 1,040 acres be developed. It has already taken three decades of discussion, committees, and debate to get to this point.

I will keep dreaming of a European ski experience coming to Utah.

http://www.boston.com/travel/explorene/specials/ski/blog/2014/12/utahs_euro-ski.html

Vail’s Park City/Canyons deal ushers in Era of the Interconnect

Today’s announcement of Vail Resorts’ $182.5 million deal to buy Powdr Corp’s Park City Mountain Resort and connect to its neighboring Canyons Resort gives a huge boost to Utah’s One Wasatch plan to connect seven ski areas accessed by one lift ticket.

Besides being the first link in the network, the Park City/Canyons connection alone will create a 7,000-acre-plus ski complex that will immediately rank as the largest in the United States once the lifts are in place by the 2015-16 ski season (pending government approvals).

But One Wasatch – a concept announced last spring by trade association Ski Utah and endorsed by all seven resorts – would create an 18,000-acre, 100-lift interconnected complex that would rank among the great ski networks in the world.

With six relatively simple lift connections, One Wasatch would link Park City/Canyons (more than 7,000 acres) and Deer Valley (2,026) in the Park City area to Brighton (1,050) and Solitude (1,200) in Big Cottonwood Canyon and Alta (2,200) and Snowbird (2,500) in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

Six of those seven resorts (excluding Canyons) are already part of the Ski Utah Interconnect, a guided $325 backcountry experience that can be done with standard alpine equipment. One Wasatch would add Canyons and connect all seven with lift access. No hiking necessary.

In fact, the seven ski areas mentioned are so close there’s very little hiking required now, as I discovered when I skied the Interconnect in 2006. Touring between ski resorts and ski towns is a uniquely European ski experience, and to some degree will stay that way even if One Wasatch comes to fruition, because Utah’s only real ski town on par with Breckenridge, Telluride, Aspen, Steamboat and Vail is Park City. Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons just contain ski areas.

Still, Utah will suddenly have a lot more to offer than “just” some of the best powder skiing on the planet. Besides serving up consistently deep snow a mere 35 to 40 minutes from Salt Lake City International Airport, the state will have a truly European-style interconnected alpine skiing experience that could make it a threat to Colorado’s skier-day dominance in the United States.

Since hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics, Utah has seen its skier days climb from 3 million to 4 million a season, but that still pales in comparison to Colorado’s 12 million skier days a season – by far the most in the nation. The One Wasatch concept is one that’s been around for decades.

If bigger is truly better, however, a combined Park City/Canyons complex and eventually the One Wasatch interconnect will give Utah something Colorado can’t compete with in terms of sheer acreage. The closest any Colorado resort can come to 7,300 acres is Vail’s 5,289, which makes it the largest single-mountain resort in North America.

The largest ski complex on the continent is Whistler/Blackcomb – linked by an incredibly soaring gondola — at 8,171 acres. Vail Resorts could come close in Colorado if it were to someday link Vail with Beaver Creek (1,818 acres) – a complex that would total 8,107 acres.

But that interconnect remains a distance fantasy of Vail’s founding fathers that would require a permitting miracle given the amount of public land involved, although at one point Vail did own the Meadow Mountain ski area (now a tubing hill) between the two resorts. Now it also contains the local Forest Service headquarters after Vail sold the property years ago. The town of Minturn also might have something to say about such a plan, although there are some advocates of a Minturn ski portal living in that funky old railroad town at the bottom of the Minturn Mile – a famous backcountry ski egress off Vail Mountain.

Environmentally speaking, I think lift-connected resorts make a lot of sense, removing cars from the roads and encouraging public transportation in general. Park your car for a week and get around on free shuttles and lifts. Better yet, take a shuttle from the airport and leave your car at home.

Telluride has just such a commuter gondola linking its truly classic ski town to the swanky real estate development of Mountain Village, and one resort complex in Colorado that could rival One Wasatch is Aspen.

Connect all four Aspen ski areas — Snowmass, (3,332 acres), Aspen Mountain, (675), Aspen Highlands (1,040) and Buttermilk (470) — and you’d have some of the best skiing on the planet linked up into a 5,517-acre complex. Of course, that’s still just a little bit bigger than Vail.

But an Aspen interconnect would be a game-changer in Colorado, allowing people to stay in Snowmass Village and ski over to the quintessential mining-town-turned-ski-town of Aspen and vice versa. That’s what’s really attractive about interconnects for the average tourist. It’s not so much the ski-terrain access as it is the ability to tour between ski towns, have lunch somewhere else and ski back.

There’s been talk of connecting some of the Aspen mountains in the past, such as Snowmass to tiny Buttermilk (site of the globally renowned Winter X Games) through Burnt Mountain, but that plan drew opposition from no less a luminary than ski mountaineer Lou Dawson.

Part of the charm of skiing in Europe is touring between quaint ski villages, wining, dining and touring back. A Vail-to Minturn-to-Beaver Creek-to-Edwards connection could achieve something like that in Colorado, but there would be huge opposition from environmentalists, some Minturn residents and backcountry skiers seeking to protect their private stashes.

From Vail’s Outer Mongolia Bowl you can see the slopes of Beaver Creek to the west and Copper Mountain to the east, but – unlike the Utah resorts – there are huge swaths of public land in between. Plus you now have the question of whether Vail Resorts and Powdr Corp. will ever be able to play nice again after months of bitter litigation at Park City.

Former Park City owner Powdr owns Copper, which sits between Vail and Vail Resorts’ Breckenridge ski complex. But the distances are so much greater than the Wasatch ski areas, and there’s the matter of all that public land in between in Colorado. It’s mostly all private in Utah.

That includes arguably the best skiing in the state at Alta/Snowbird, where expert skiers who like to hike will continue to congregate rather than the intermediate pitches of Park City, which fit so nicely into Vail’s quiver of big but relatively benign resorts like Vail, Breck, Keystone and Heavenly.

And Snowbird is now owned by the Cumming family, which also owns Powdr, so that’s another complicating factor in the One Wasatch equation. Ironically, Dick Bass, brother of former Vail owner Harry Bass, recently sold Snowbird to Ian Cumming.

If you’re a true expert skier, you don’t really go to Colorado to ski Vail or Utah to ski Park City or Lake Tahoe to ski Heavenly. You’re more likely to be drawn to Aspen, Crested Butte or Telluride in Colorado, Alta/Snowbird in Utah and Squaw Valley/Alpine Meadows in Tahoe.

Which brings me to another interconnect scenario involving another Colorado company, KSL Capital Partners. Lake Tahoe’s many resorts are in some cases closely grouped and ideal for Euro-style interconnects, but that’s especially true of KSL’s Squaw/Alpine complex, which no less of an industry expert than Warren Miller would like to see connected all the way to Homewood.

Right now Squaw Valley (3,600 acres) and Alpine Meadows (2,400) are side by side and can be skied in one day on one ticket, but the interconnect is less than ideal. That could change in just a few years if a deal can be worked out with the private resort of White Wolf in between the two.

Locals there are pumped about what would then be the largest interconnected ski complex in the United States at more than 6,000 skiable acres, but with the Park City deal now in the books, they’ll ultimately have to settle for second best in the U.S. and third in North America.

Regardless, it’s clear that with no new ski areas being built in the last couple of decades and none on the horizon, we’ve boldly entered into the Era of the Interconnect.

Link: http://goo.gl/LzCyU0

Salt Lake Tribune: Ski Utah Pitching New Plan to Link 7 Resorts

Ski Utah is offering a few more details about where lifts would be needed to make One Wasatch, its plan for interconnecting the seven Wasatch Mountain ski resorts, a reality.

Two sets of lifts are envisioned in a conceptual plan to be released Tuesday, said Nathan Rafferty, president and CEO of Ski Utah, marketing arm for the state’s ski industry.

The first set, connecting Little Cottonwood and Big Cottonwood canyons, would require Alta Ski Area to install a lift up Grizzly Gulch to the ridgeline, where it would hook up with a lift coming up Honeycomb Canyon from Solitude Mountain Resort.

The connection between Big Cottonwood and the Park City side of the Wasatch would take place in the Guardsman Pass area. One lift would make it possible for riders coming from Brighton’s Great Western lift to reach Park City Mountain Resort, while the other would help transport skiers and snowboarders from PCMR’s Jupiter Bowl area over to Brighton.

This latest plan does away with the proposed Ski Link hookup between Solitude and Canyons Resort.

Conservationists and backcountry skiers reviled Ski Link as a precursor to the interconnect plan, in part because it opened up hard-to-access terrain to people riding lifts. But Ski Link has been on the backburner for more than a year, ever since Canyons Resort turned its attention instead to acquiring PCMR.

Because of the unresolved litigation in that fight, the new design does not address a connection between Canyons and PCMR, physically the easiest to do.  No connection may be necessary if Canyons prevails in that lawsuit.

A 3rd District judge gave PCMR until Friday to post a $17.5 million bond that would keep the resort going through the upcoming season while PCMR appeals an earlier ruling upholding Canyons’ ability to evict it for failing to renew a mountainside lease on time.

The other three connections — between Deer Valley and PCMR, Brighton and Solitude, and Alta and Snowbird — already are in place.

“Connecting seven of Utah’s finest ski resorts while preserving both our water quality and an unrivaled backcountry task is not an impossible task,” Rafferty said Monday.

“We have decided to move a step forward in the vision process by conceptualizing lift alignments on a map to continue providing information to the public, encouraging dialogue and listening to feedback about these possible connections,” he added, noting that a Ski Utah survey also showed solid public support for the interconnect idea.

Ski Utah sent a short survey to 35,000 online subscribers to its monthly newsletter or daily snow reports, receiving more than 3,000 back. Of those, 45 percent think an interconnect is a great idea, while another 28 percent said it was somewhat good. About 19 percent of respondents thought One Wasatch was a somewhat or very bad idea.

Neither the lift alignments nor the survey results surprised Save Our Canyons Executive Director Carl Fisher, nor did they diminish his objections to the concept.

“If we did a poll of our membership, we would find that 90 percent want to see wilderness expanded through the Wasatch Mountains,” he said. “Polls aren’t very conclusive when you’re not polling an objective portion of the community.”

Fisher said the lift alignments around Guardsman Pass and between the Cottonwood canyons were relatively easy to predict. The most troublesome part to him involves Alta’s plan for Grizzly Gulch, which he believes would require an amendment to the U.S. Forest Service master plan.

“That is not something we would support at all,” Fisher said. “The plan says the ski resorts in their existing configuration is adequate. We agree with that.”

At present, the Grizzly Gulch lift is contemplated to go over a parcel of Forest Service property that is not part of Alta’s special use permit, which would require extra environmental analysis.

That doesn’t concern Alta General Manager Onno Wieringa, noting he has spent years talking to the Forest Service about Grizzly Gulch’s potential and challenges.

“The Forest Service likes us to do what makes the most sense, to have the best alignment that works for the best of the people and not to do convoluted things,” Wieringa said. “This makes the best sense to us. We’ll see if we can work something out with the Forest Service.”

He likes Rafferty’s plan to submit the concept to Mountain Accord, a broad-based public and private effort trying to determine how best to treat the popular central Wasatch Mountains in a more heavily populated future.

“They have so many people involved and they’re really good at getting people to put their cards on the table and say ‘this is what we’re thinking.’ I would like to think that the recommendations [Mountain Accord] comes up with will be looked at by the Forest Service as a good public process,” Wieringa said.

Fisher also thinks Mountain Accord is a good forum to vet interconnect issues.

“It’s certainly more inclusive, definitely a more robust process,” he said. “Mountain Accord has its issues. It’s trying to bite off a whole lot and it’s a little overwhelming. But it’s a pretty good venue.”

No timetable has been set for development, Rafferty said.

mikeg@sltrib.com

Twitter: @sltribmikeg

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/58389385-90/ski-lift-canyons-plan.html.csp