When three Park City High students wanted to know how to snag first chair when Park City Mountain opened its ski season Friday, they knew just who to ask:
One of their teachers.
Ryan Cook teaches business and marketing at the high school. However, he once attended school there and made a tradition of being on the first chair on opening day.
“I thought of doing this, I just didn’t know how,” Jackson Schroeter, 16, said. “So I asked him, and then he told us the full plan.”
That plan entailed tents, sleeping bags and plenty of snacks.
Schroeter and his friends Landon Macan and Max Skrypek, also 16, plotted to arrive at the Mountain Village base, which is the closest to downtown Park City, at 5 p.m. Thursday — the night before opening day. Finding some young women had already beaten them to the spoils there, they dashed to the resort’s other base closer to Kimball Junction.
There they also weren’t the first to arrive. Ryder Frahm and Kennan Varelman, both seniors at Heber City’s Wasatch High, had plunked their chairs down three hours earlier.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Skiers ride the Saddleback Express, on opening day at Park City Mountain Resort, on Friday, Nov 22, 2024.
“We did this last year, and my car broke down on the way,” Frahm, 17, said. “So, we got beat out by one crew. So we decided to come extra early to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.”
Both groups spent the entire freezing night in line. The kids from Wasatch High dozed in their camp chairs stationed in front of the Red Pine Gondola. Meanwhile, the Park City boys slept in tents on top of the cold bricks right behind them.
“It was a lot of tossing and turning,” Schroeter said. He added, “At 5 a.m., I woke up and wondered, ‘How am I going to do this?”
At least for breakfast they were treated to warm “Orange Bubble Bites” — doughnut hole treats the resort plans to begin offering for free to skiers and snowboarders at the end of each day.
Yet, perhaps because they know the sting of second chair or maybe just because the gondola seats eight Frahm and Varelman shared first chair with the Park City skiers. But the official banner breaking would take place atop the Saddleback Express, a high-speed quad accessed via the gondola. That meant the group of five had to be whittled down to four.
Macan sacrificed himself.
“‘Cause,” the sophomore explained, “I’ve got two more chances at it.”
He and his buddies have learned their lesson.
More than 200 people were in line for the gondola when the high schoolers climbed on board. They had their pick of 10 runs off six lifts plus two Magic Carpets, with the number of open runs and lifts split fairly evenly between the two bases. Much of the snow was machine made with an average base depth of 16 inches.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sean Bartholomew checks in skiers on opening day at Park City Mountain Resort, on Friday, Nov 22, 2024.
Deirdra Walsh, Park City Mountain’s vice president and chief operating officer, said it took the efforts of hundreds of employees to prep both sides of the mountain for opening day. Park City Mountain has more lift-accessed terrain than any other ski area in the United States, and it will take roughly 2,000 employees to keep the resort humming through the winter.
In September, Vail Resorts, Park City Mountain’s publicly traded parent company, announced cuts to staff following several quarters of revenue losses. Visitors may not notice, however, since a 14% reduction in corporate staff makes up the bulk of the cuts. Only .2% of front-facing employees will be dismissed.
Walsh did not say how many cuts or hiring freezes had to be made at Park City Mountain. However, because the resort is becoming more efficient, she said, some changes may result in an even better lift experience overall in 2024-25.
“Part of that transformation is having a new Lift Experience Team,” she said. “Previously, my imagination is that most guests probably thought that a scanning team and the lift operations team were one. They weren’t. So, we have now a Lift Experience Team that’s really focused on a seamless experience from the time you put on your skis or your snowboard and you enter the maze, on through.”
Park City was one of three Utah ski areas that opened the 2024-25 season Friday. The other two were Woodward Park City and Alta Ski Area, the first Little Cottonwood Canyon resort to come online. Altogether, six of the state’s 15 public resorts are up and running. Three more plan to be open by Black (diamond) Friday.
One is Deer Valley, which made a surprise announcement Thursday that skiers can visit during the Thanksgiving weekend for the first time in the resort’s 40-year history. On Nov. 29, which is reserved for passholders, Deer Valley is set to offer five runs off four chairlifts, all on the traditional side of the mountain. The first three lifts of its 16-lift, 120-run Deer Valley East Village expansion aren’t slated to start spinning until mid-December.
Snowbasin has also set Nov. 29 as its opening day, while Snowbird hopes to get rolling on Thanksgiving Day.
All Utah’s resorts, and their skiers and boarders, should be able to revel in the gifts from the atmospheric river that is currently dousing the West Coast. According to OpenSnow.com, several of the resorts should get a foot of snow or more by next weekend.
Correction • Nov. 25,2024, 10:45 a.m.: This article has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Deirdra Walsh’s name, that the Red Pine Gondola seats eight and that the banner breaking ceremony was held atop the Saddleback Express.
