Alta, Snowbird Pledge to Remove All Lifts by 2030
Ski Areas to Stay Intact With Road Network for Private Vehicles
Bowing to pressure from pro-car advocates who fiercely oppose the proposed gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon, Alta and Snowbird jointly announced today that they would reverse their support for the eight-mile-long machine, and would also begin removing their legacy lift infrastructure as soon as this summer. In its place, the ski areas will construct a network of paved roads to their summits, so that skiers can move up and down the mountains at their leisure.
The project, which is expected to be completed by the 2030-31 ski season, is an acknowledgement by two of America’s most well-regarded ski areas that their entire operational philosophy has been flawed since Alta opened in 1938.
“You have to admit when you’re wrong,” said Alta majority shareholder Roger Johnson. “And what the anti-gondola crowd made us realize is that chairlifts are stupid. Everyone already owns a vehicle. So why are we making them park at the bottom of the ski area and inconveniencing them to ride our cold, exposed chairlifts, when they can just keep driving to the top in the comfort of their own kick-ass vehicle?”
Snowbird personnel were quick to point to the aesthetic benefits of swapping out the mountain’s lift fleet for personal vehicles. “When it takes me three hours to get to work from the mouth of the canyon, I get so fired up by the sight of all those brake lights snaking for miles ahead of me,” said Snowbird CEO Juliette Moreau. “Then I get up here, and we have all these ugly-ass chairlifts flying all over the mountain. They’re hideous. And sometimes I just dream – what if we could recreate those strings of brake lights to the summit of Hidden Peak? What a stunning sight that will be.”
Both Snowbird and Alta plan special accommodations for vehicles headed up and down the newly built roads, which will mostly snake along the routes of existing liftlines. Snowbird will build a drive-through In-N-Out Burger on the ridgeline between the Tower 5 and Dalton’s Draw trails, and will transform the tunnel to Mineral Basin into an escape room. Alta will construct a drive-through castle on the road up to Devil’s Castle, where drivers can play carnival games, upgrade their tires, and, if traffic gets really heavy, rent a room for the night. Each road will sit alongside a concrete return chute, where skiers can deposit their cars while they ski to the bottom.
“It’s pretty cool,” said Johnson. “You just stick your car in neutral and it drops straight down the mountain. If you’ve ever been bowling, it’s basically the same thing.”
Asked what sort of mechanism would prevent the cars from crashing into each other at the bottom, Johnson told me that, “if you’re so worried about that, go ski at Deer Valley, where you’ll still be able to ride your precious chairlifts.”
Gondola opponents were overjoyed at the announcement. “We’ve been saying for years that the very best way for individuals to navigate avalanche-prone terrain in severe winter weather is behind the wheel of their own car,” said Thomas Timthomas, founder of GondolasAreForWussies.com, as he was booting up in the parking lot near Snowbird’s Creekside lodge on Monday morning. “Finally, Alta and Snowbird adopted some common sense and realized that Americans hate riding lifts. I want to drive my own goddamn pickup truck to the top of Supreme, not share a lift ride with a bunch of tourists from Kansas who want the lame-ass bar down.”
Cameron Watkins, a 23-year-old who lives in Salt Lake City and has been skiing Alta since he was 4, was “hella stoked” that the lift removals would grant him additional opportunities to brag about owning snow tires. “Even though I drive around town on dry pavement 99.5 percent of the winter, that eight-mile drive up to the Wildcat lot once every other week justifies me spending $1,200 on an extra set of tires. If they’d have built the gondola, I probably wouldn’t have needed them at all. Now, I’ll need them even more, and I can brag about it basically nonstop on social media – I’m @SnowTiresBro on Insta by the way.”
Skiers who don’t own cars will be able to rent one at the bottom of the canyon. While lift tickets will no longer be required to ski, a per-passenger toll will apply to each vehicle on each trip up the mountain. Both resorts expect to leave the Ikon and Mountain Collective passes, since, as Moreau characterized it, “cooperation and working together are bullshit. Does this look like France to you? This is U.S. motherfucking America, and no one has a right to tell a skier when, where, or how they can get to the top of a mountain.”
Asked who would administer salvage operations in the event of an on-mountain crash or mechanical failure, Johnson said that resort personnel would most likely just push the cars off the road. “The snow will cover them in a day or two. We get a fuckton of it. And they’ll make sick terrain park features.”
Moreau suggested that lift removal could mark the first stage of a dramatic reimagining of Alta and Snowbird as giant deathmatch amphitheaters where the most souped-up, badass cars could compete in real-time demolition derbies. “Imagine Mad Max, but on snow,” she said. “What Americans are most proud of are their vehicles and their ability to drive them while also checking their TikTok. So eventually we can get rid of this skiing bullshit and just let the most ferocious rigs dominate the mountain.”
Whatever the ultimate outcome, Timthomas expressed deep relief on Monday morning. “For a while there, I was really nervous that I would be able to get up SR-210 in under 40 minutes on the gondola,” he said. “That would have been just awful. I love waking up at 4 a.m. to get to a ski area that’s 15 miles from my house by 11:00. Wasting gas. Sitting in traffic behind thousands of other cars. Bragging about how awesome my $80,000 truck is. These are American traditions, as old as the Wild West. Building that gondola would have destroyed that entire culture. But this only makes it better.”
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The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 23/100 in 2024, and number 523 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
This is the STUPIDEST thing I have read. How is driving individual cars more GREEN than a ski lift? With such a focus on individualism, no wonder this country is falling apart
I know it’s April Fools’ Day, and that this is a joke, but this is the point I’ve been trying to make for the last few years.
All the NIMBYs at the mouth of the canyon, who say they care about the environment so much, just don’t want to admit that the pollution from cars is a lot worse.
The people who say, “just take the ski bus” have never been stuck behind a ski bus going up or down the canyon.
If we had a gondola, I wouldn’t have to drive on the icy road. I wouldn’t be stuck behind a line of brake lights and I probably would ski Snowbird and Alta more than I do Park City. Note that I ski Park City merely so I can avoid the traffic problem in the Cottonwood Canyons.
Those who say that people would only use it in the winter time and just for the ski resorts don’t realize that people would ride it in the summertime for the views and to get to hiking trails. I often go to Snowbird in the summertime just to ride the tram with my kids. I don’t ever hear anybody say, “why are we taking the tram? We could just drive our big trucks up here!” It’s ridiculous.