Requiem for a Ski Town

By Marc Peruzzi

Park City’s ski patrol strike was a canary in a coal mine. The patrollers won, but the canary—ski culture in mountain towns—is still on life support.

Turns out, Park City was just a microcosm. PHOTO: Courtesy of Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association

So you want to hate on Vail Resorts for how they treated Park City ski patrollers during the recent strike? 

Well, I’m not going to try to dissuade you. That affair was poorly handled by a petty and tone-deaf conglomerate that netted $230 million in 2024.

What I will argue is that the plight of ski patrollers in Park City—and just about everywhere else—is a symptom of a much larger disease that’s killing not just ski patrolling, but mountain culture. It’s an epidemic, but the problem is bigger than the lab-grown, spiked protein with bubble chairs that is Vail Resorts.    

Ski Patrol’s latest flash-point ended January 8, when Park City patrollers reached an agreement with Vail Resorts. PHOTOS: Courtesy of Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association

Let’s start with mountain town real estate. The Nobis family (Jeremy, the big mountain skier who changed our sport, his fellow World Cup racing sister Shannon, mother Nancy, and father Craig) moved to Park City from Wisconsin in 1977. After shivering in their RV for three nights, they bought a condo for $40,000. Mom and dad raised skiers on blue-collar incomes—Nancy as a trauma nurse and Craig as a handyman. Time jump to 2025, and the median price for a Park City condo is $1.6 million. Families like Jeremy’s could not move to Park City today. 

If you’re wondering, only a fraction of that $1.6M is from inflation. Forty thousand in 2025 dollars would put the Nobis condo at $110,000 today. We are experiencing historic shifts in housing costs. Adjusted for inflation, nationally the cost of a home is twice what it was in 1965. But especially in desirable places like mountain towns, the problem is far more acute. The price of a Park City condo has increased more than tenfold. That type of exclusivity changes everything about a place. 

A bevy of forces are colliding in modern-day mountain towns. PHOTO: Jake Burchmore

I’ve lived this. In 1988, I dropped out of GO STATE! college for 18 months to work and ski. My first gig was on a long-line cod boat out of Nantucket. The island was full of working class people then. We drank with grave diggers and carpenters in bars that were packed by 11:00 a.m. In 1988, across Cape Cod and the Islands, the median home price was $135K. I’m guessing Nantucket’s was higher, say $200K, but nowhere close to what it is today—$3.73 million. 

Service industry, blue-collar, and the remains of the middle class are getting priced out of communities everywhere. But that too is just a symptom of a greater disease. America in 2025 has the highest income inequality of all the industrialized countries we like to compare ourselves to. And while it’s not quite accurate to say we are experiencing the highest pay disparity in our history—it was worse in the 1920s—what we are seeing is a growing gap between so-called “knowledge” workers in tech and other fields that require a specialized college degree—and everyone else in manufacturing, the trades, or the always struggling service industry, the latter of which, not incidentally, makes ski areas run. 

The long-term employees who keep the trails buffed and the fries salted don’t want to live in dorms the rest of their lives.

As the winners in that game have grown richer, they’ve also won other benefits. Remote work is one. For most of my career in the ski industry, wealthy and even upper-middle-class skiers bought second homes in mountain towns. That’s nothing new. But during and after Covid, second homes became primary residences. Some of these same folks, and to be fair, those townies lucky enough to have gotten in early, also own investment properties. Once upon a time those units were rented out to ski techs, school teachers, and plow truck drivers, but now those beds go to the Vrbo and Airbnb pools, reducing supply, increasing demand—and further raising housing costs.  

One form of “employee housing.” PHOTOS: (left) Matt McDonald; (center) Pat Shepp // The infamous Chicken Man. PHOTO: Tim McMahon

If you think the workforce housing the resorts are finally building is the solution, think again. After my month in Nantucket fishing and my summer in Vermont working as a mason tender, the following winter found me teaching skiing, fitting boots, and trying to make chimichangas based off a picture on a menu at Copper Mountain, Colorado. For that ski bum winter, my girlfriend (now wife) and my best friend from the cod boat lived in a seasonal rental two-bedroom condo with shag carpeting and a kitchenette. It wasn’t much, but it was far more in keeping with the American ski bum experience than the Soviet style employee housing ski resorts are building today. Which is another miscalculation by the resorts. The long-term employees who keep the trails buffed and the fries salted don’t want to live in dorms the rest of their lives. I often wonder if today’s resort executives have grown so distant that they don’t understand that. I’m saying yes. 

Add in our world-beating cost of health care—which workers pay one way or the other—and mountain town living for ski area employees has been unattainable for years. But now, with rapid inflation the situation is even worse. That older model Tacoma parked by the rec center? It’s a primary residence. Park City’s ski patrollers aren’t worried about making their Porsche Cayenne payment. They just want to buy burrito fixings for the week—because they certainly aren’t making enough to buy their lunches in the lodge.   

“Template for a North American ski town”: Crested Butte PHOTO: Nathan Bilow Photography

These economic forces are creating a monoculture of the affluent—with everyone else bused in to work. My template for a North American ski town was always Crested Butte. In 1988, it had an island vibe: remote, working-class, and fun-loving to the point of wall-eyed derangement. Hippies were allowed in the front door back then. The lift rats—college dropouts like me—lived in town. I once helped pull a rancher’s flatbed and stock trailer out of a snowbank after a skier cut him off. I mention that because there were still ranchers then, just like, if you’ve read the roadside plaques, there used to be miners in Aspen and Park City. 

Now it’s the skiers who are going extinct. And you know which skiers I’m talking about. Keeping with the ranching theme, there once was a ski area called Beef Trail outside of Butte and Anaconda, Montana. Beyond the unmatched name, Beef Trail wasn’t much, just a grassy hillside on leased grazing land. But in 1938, the miners, ranchers, and their kids made a go of it. It’s an old story. Car wheel rope tows, donated bulldozer work from the mines, after-school skiing in wool army pants, and eventually chairlifts and even snowmaking. Beef Trail also formed a volunteer ski patrol team, on account of the scores of monthly tib/fib fractures caused by the early leather boots and bear trap bindings. 

Behold: The Beef

Climate change and long-term weather shifts shuttered Beef Trail in 1990. But I bring it up to make a point. The type of people that started our ski areas: rawboned immigrants, can-do blue-collar workers, 10th Mountain Division vets squinting through clouds of cataracts, and yeah, hairbag skiers of every generation willing to bump chairs, shovel decks, and run toboggans, have been relegated to pariah status today by the over-industrialized destination ski resorts—call them Big Glisse. 

Which gets me back to Vail Resorts and the ski patrol strike. Remember when we were all thanking our essential workers during Covid? My Missoula neighborhood was howling for the nurses at sundown. That was sooo nice. It was virtue signaling, but for dogs, too. Predictably though, it only took a minute before we as a culture forgot about everyone that contributes to society besides tech bros, pro athletes, and celebrities. 

Bring back the American skier’s dream of a wood stove mining shack in town with a picket fence made out of straight skis.

Vail even forgot that ski patrollers are essential workers. But the strike reminded them that besides looking sharp in red, patrollers run avalanche mitigation, get the mountain open, and respond to injured guests who are often screaming in terror while bleeding—despite how much they spent at the ticket window. But that forgetfulness is understandable if, say, you are Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten A. Lynch and you pulled in $19 million over the past few years. What, you want first aid with that pass product? Can we sell you the service as an upgrade with flokati lined toboggans? If ski patrol can’t generate revenue, let the patrollers eat cake!

PHOTO: Courtesy of National Ski Patrol

Ho to the hum. This is as depressing as a Gen Z sleepover. And to piss my initials in your snowbank a little deeper, on the bigger socio-economic issues, I don’t see any help coming from our politicians. They also forgot that the working and middle classes were supposed to be able to buy homes in this country. As with climate change and the cost of healthcare, income inequality wasn’t even a talking point this past “election” year for either party. 

I’m not proposing anything extreme like a reallocation of wealth. I just want the type of capitalism my parent’s generation enjoyed when CEO’s only made 30 times what their employees earned, not 300. Bring back the American skier’s dream of a wood stove mining shack in town with a picket fence made out of straight skis. Or as Martin Luther King put it: “a land where men will not take necessities from the many and give luxuries to the few.”  

Unfortunately, passion doesn’t pay rent. PHOTOS: Bianca Germain

But there is hope. Maybe the father tech lords will call their bros home. Or the inevitable Boomer die off will ease the housing crunch. There’s also a chance Big Glisse will remember that a ski town is not an EPICot Center replica of a place, although it might take a cattle prod like this one: 

On January 27, one month after Park City’s ski patrollers went on strike and a few weeks after Vail Resorts agreed to their terms, Late Apex Partners, an investment fund “with an operating mindset” that is heavily invested in Vail Resorts, called the company out for gross mismanagement. In their open letter they noted that Kirsten A. Lynch doesn’t even buy VR’s stock, which they view as a total lack of confidence by a CEO stuffing money in the mattress; that the conglomerate’s strategy of installing new lifts and acquiring other ski areas isn’t much of a strategy at all and instead is just reactionary; and that the excessive payout of dividends to shareholders has hurt the business. But here’s the money line: “The core skiing community has labeled Vail the ‘Evil Empire.’ Vail’s marketing reductions, and decision to centralize marketing under CEO Lynch has created significant gaps, been inauthentic, and cut out the heart of each mountain. Management’s incredibly short-sighted actions have led to lost opportunities and destroyed brand value.” (Italics mine.)

PHOTOS: (left, center) Courtesy of Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association; (right, bottom) Jake Burchmore

It’s nice that Park City’s patrollers got that hotly contested $4 bump in pay. But maybe the fallout of Vail’s mismanagement will signal to the industry and the Realtors in charge of the city councils in mountain towns that the experience of skiing and mountain life is bigger than what they are serving up. That idea is no longer just held by the “core skiing community.” Vail Resorts has taught its own destination guests and investors that ski culture matters, too. 

That’s because a ski area, or a mountain town, without the people that were drawn there by passion, is like Nashville without musicians, Gloucester without fishermen, and Greenwich Village without artists—just another lace curtain bedroom community with a history, but no future.  

Also from Marc: Skiing Will Survive the Apocalypse, from March 2021

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