On Wednesday, we complained about the poor communication from Vail Mountain concerning last weekend’s hideous lift lines; shortly thereafter, we got a statement from Beth Howard, the resort’s chief operating officer. It was too long a’coming but it did cover the bases: we’re sorry; here’s what happened; not our fault; safety first; we’ll try to do better. And the perennial We’re working real real hard.
To be fair, Howard says skiers responded to the massive snowfall by queuing up for the main gondola at 6 a.m., two hours before a normal open. (She adds that the lines were gone by 10 a.m. Friday and 9:15 a.m. Saturday.) She also claims most of the mountain was relatively free from long waits, with the exception of a bottleneck getting up to the back bowls; there, 30-minute-plus lines persisted between 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Howard says she’ll be better about communications: “You’ll see more updates and information on all of Vail Mountain’s social accounts, and I’m pleased to share the EpicMix app has been upgraded so that you can rely on it for accurate lift line wait times.” This is so. At 9:30 today, the app indicated wait times from zero to nine minutes.
Our last post on overcrowding didn’t reference a recent, instructive story on the matter in Outside. It includes horror stories from around the country (people waiting to park for six hours before being turned away), desperate attempts at limiting crowds (several resorts no longer offer walk-up tickets), and fascinating stats (“ski and snowboard visits are up 18 percent since 1978, to almost 60 million last year” with the Rocky Mountain region catching the bulk of the increase while “the Midwest is down by a third”). Ski passes are certainly part of the problem, as are population increases and inadequate infrastructure (e.g., access roads, parking). We would add advances in equipment that make the sport more appealing to more newbies.
Ski hills can acquire more land and mass transit can do a better job of shuffling people on and off the hill…but you can only do so much to correct for swarms of people who long to get outdoors and feel that lovely adrenaline-and-endorphin cocktail followed by a bowl of chili and a beer. Happily, most old skiers can do their skiing midweek; it’s the youngsters who must contend with the nightmare of weekends on the hill. Be nice to them.
Image: The ticket window at Aspen, 1974. Skiers had to wait up to an hour just to put their money down, which tells us that overcrowding at resorts is not a new issue. By Ron Hoffman, from The National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons.
