Written by Hans Ludwig
“Deserves got nothin’ to do with it.”
–Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven
Among ski lifers, the resort conglomerate known as Vail and Associates enjoys a level of esteem comparable to breakable crust or a torn meniscus, and for good reason. We generally consider that organization a grotesque parasite, a bloated tick slurping the blood from a sport and culture they did not build and do not care about. Vail is in the business of consuming us and our world, making skiing ever blander and more expensive, and our lives harder and worse. It’s no surprise that they pay their patrollers like shit or offload their management mistakes onto their customers, because the people who run Vail are a pack of greasy, slithering, no-account shitheels who ski like gapers and would happily sell their own mothers for a Range Rover payment or another shiny watch.
There’s powder now in Utah, but paying skiers at Park City won’t exactly be crushing freshies unless they can find some in the endless lift lines. As I write this it’s Day 11 of the ski patrol strike there, eleven days that have exposed a massive weakness in the modern American ski resort industry. Today, without a functioning patrol, about 20% of Park City’s sprawling terrain is open (vs. 90% at other Utah resorts), and their guests are enjoying hour-long waits for chairs and runs that resemble LA’s 405 freeway at rush hour.
(AP Photo/Melissa Majchrzak)
Like snowpack stacking up on an unstable base of loose, early-season, faceted snow, the multi-billion dollar mega-resort industry (now dominated by just two organizations) is dependent on a tiny fraction of their employees showing up to work every day at zero dark thirty. At resorts that require avalanche mitigation the entire day’s operation can hang on a handful of skilled patrollers showing up to throw explosives and perform sketchy ski cuts to manually trigger avalanches. Which is not to say that other employees aren’t vital too: hard-ass, tower-climbing, lift maintenance staff are next in line, followed by snow-removal and cat operators, snowmakers, lifties etc., right on down to folks like the parking lot attendants–virtually none of whom can afford to live on their wages.
But there is only one group that in addition to the daily physical risk of, say, just skiing around in flat light with a heavy load of fencing, faces a very real hazard of blowing themselves up, getting suffocated, strained through trees, and falling off cliffs. That would be the grumpy people in the red coats. Granted, I have been around the ski world for a Long Time, but I personally knew three patrollers who died at work, and know several with life-changing work injuries. Two veteran patrol directors have died while doing avalanche control. Virtually every patroller I’ve ever met at big resorts has been caught in a slide at work, many with hospital time after. Among the senior patrollers the rate of significant or debilitating injuries is virtually 100%, to say nothing of the pervasive PTSD from close calls and responding to gruesome and traumatic on-hill injuries or deaths. Veteran ski patrollers are the people you want on-scene when shit goes south, and they pay a price for it.
At Park City they’ve been doing it for significantly lower wages than a housekeeper in the ski town where I live, and less than half what I get to smoke dope and perform half-ass carpentry.
While Park City doesn’t have the level of hazard at snowier, steeper resorts like Alta or Jackson, they do indeed have enough avalanche potential and terrain in runout zones to require avalanche mitigation to open large areas of terrain. This, combined with recent snowfall, is what’s given the Park City ski patrollers the leverage to actually fuck with a seven billion dollar conglomerate. Vail management has assumed that patrollers were replaceable or outsource-able, that they were dumb enough to keep busting their asses and risking their lives for the questionable prestige of a Red Coat and unquestionable satisfaction that comes from helping others in a beautiful place.
Crippled operations, hour-long lines, tumbling stock values, and a growing PR disaster would suggest that Vail has overestimated the patroller’s (admittedly very high) willingness to eat shit.
On the surface it seems like a discrete problem, one that, given the relatively mild demands of the union, should be no big deal for a seven billion dollar company. But Vail is rightly terrified that the instability could spread to other resorts and other departments. The Park City patrol is just one of many loose facets at the base of their snowpack.
By and large the Big Ski Co’s strategy for dealing with the housing-driven economic challenges for staff has been to resist wage growth, use visa’d guest workers or desperate immigrant labor where possible, and wait for the taxpayers to pick up the tab by subsidizing affordable housing. And it’s worked! They’ve been able to operate with minimum staffing levels (patrollers and lift maintenance workers at multiple major resorts have told me they are operating at near 50% staffing) and kept wage growth well below inflation.
There have been grumblings of patrol or resort employee strikes before, but Park City is the first time that the resort industry’s internal fractures have really seeped out into the national awareness, and shaken business operations. What happens when the lift maintenance folks follow suit? The snowmakers? The skids in the rental shop? Seems like Vail wants to find out.
Helpful people will of course point out that Vail can hardly be expected to give everyone a raise or better benefits, and ski patrolling at smaller hills or on the East Coast isn’t nearly as skilled or dangerous. Well, that’s just too fucking bad for Vail. They’re such a shitty employer that patrols and other departments at a number of their resorts felt forced to unionize. They’ve had ten months to settle with the PC patrol and strung it out, on their customer’s dime. They deserve every bit of this.
Vail has calculated that they’re holding the cards, that they can stonewall the union, that 200-odd ski patrollers are replaceable. What the executives didn’t include in their calculus is that they are the replaceable ones. The C-suite doesn't know how to run an avalanche route or fix a snowcat or wash dishes. It’s not like Vail is the only pack of creepy fleece vest MBA’s that can run a ski resort. Hopefully more employees will choose to resist the bullshit, and more customers will choose not to buy their boring and parasitic product.
At any rate, one final perspective from a life-long skier: if I’m going to ski on or beneath avalanche terrain, I’d sure like that snowpack to be mitigated by people who know what they’re doing. If I need to be evacuated from a broken lift I’d like it to be done by people who know what they’re doing. If I have a pneumothorax or a compound-fractured femur I’d like the person who has to stabilize me and get me down the mountain in a hundred-pound toboggan to be a skilled first-responder and strong skier. In my own work I’ve been lucky enough to run scary avalanche routes with snow safety professionals, and unlucky enough to require a toboggan extraction in steep, precarious terrain. It’s hard, high-risk work that requires a ton of experience and continuing education.
Deserves got nothin’ to do with it, but a few bucks an hour and a health insurance stipend seems pretty goddamn reasonable in light of the above paragraph
Now’s a great time to not give any of your hard-earned money to Vail, and donate to the GoFundMe that’s been set up to help the striking patrollers pay rent. Maybe they’ve triggered a different kind of avalanche this time…
Link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/strike-fund-park-city-professional-ski-patrol-association
Editor’s Note: Late Wednesday night, the Park City Ski Patrol Union announced they reached a tentative agreement with Park City Mountain through April 2027.
