Seems like the skiing and riding experience over at Park City Mountain Resort’s open terrain at Canyons Village was an absolute dumpster fire yesterday.
We received a lot of this information from @epicliftlines. Which is run by the former ‘Wintry Mix Podcast’ host who now goes by Weird Foothills Guy on Twitter. The images and reports were sent to his Instagram handle from people who were at the scene.
Here’s what I can summarize based on the information I’ve gathered from the internet. Park City has two trails open at The Canyons Village side that requires guests to download on The Red Pine Gondola in order to return to the base at the end of the day.
Yesterday, the Red Pine Gondola was closed for more than 4 hours due to strong winds. This left skiers, including young families stranded at the top of the Red Pine Gondola with no way to return to the base area of the resort.
PCMR eventually opened Chicane, a blue-rated trail that was definitely not suitable for families to descend considering the poor snow conditions, but it provided a way for advanced skiers to reach the bottom of Tombstone where shuttle buses were waiting to ferry them back down to the base area.
The remaining skiers were forced to wait for winds to die down. @KPCWRadio reports that the remaining skiers reached the base area by 5:15PM when the winds calmed and PCMR was able to safely run the gondola again.
@PCski reports after winds died down, the resort restarted the Red Pine Gondola and transported all remaining skiers back to the Canyons Village base area by around 5:15 p.m.
— KPCW Radio (@KPCWRadio) December 6, 2021
What a headache.
PCMR clearly got stuck with a really shitty situation, but it seems like in hindsight that they should have just stuck with the open terrain over on the Park City village side, right? Relying on a gondola to download guests on a windy day smells like a disaster waiting to happen, and that’s kind of what ended up happening over at PCMR yesterday.
Thankfully nobody was injured or hurt. That’s what ultimately matters the most, but something tells me PCMR might reconsider opening up terrain over at Canyons Village in the future if downloading on the Red Pine Gondola is the only way to get guests back down to the base area.
Also, it just really really really really needs to snow across the American west. The beginning of this season has been downright abysmal for most ski resorts. Here’s to hoping things improve for the rest of the season 🤞