Rarely does a labor fight facilitate such rich, obvious imagery, but the Park City strike provided: A disgusted Twitter user’s camera shows a cluster of skiers massing at the base of a lift, huddled in at a density instantly identifiable even to the non-skier as oversaturated; as the shot pans left, we see the lift is running parallel to the cameraperson, establishing that they are not even in that clogged main line, but in fact waiting to enter its maw; finally, the up-mountain angle shows they’re lucky to at least be in the front of this auxiliary line, as there are several dozen people behind them, spanning the length of cable between two support poles. Conditions, naturally, are incredible. All that new snow, and no way to get onto it.
It becomes very clear upon watching this clip or any of the others like it that Park City Mountain Resort cannot function without its ski patrol workers, and that the resort’s owner, Vail Resorts, views both its labor force and clientele with scorn and indifference. The ongoing strike in Park City is, like any labor dispute, a discrete fight between two parties over the permissible parameters of exploitation. But it is also a fracture, a break caused by the overwhelming pressure of extractivism’s ruthless logic applied past the breaking point of rationality. The long lines and the testimonies of strikebreaking skiers who had to get rescued by cut-rate scab ski patrollers are the clearest and most visually striking representations of what happens when a service-based industry is held hostage by capital until it can no longer operate as such.
The Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association (PCPSPA) began negotiating with Vail Resorts when its contract expired last May, well before the 2024–25 skiing season. The union, which boasts over 200 members, reached agreements with management over smaller issues like hours and uniforms by September, but hit an impasse over pay. Entry level PCPSPA workers make $21 per hour on their current deal, which they signed in 2021 only after 18 months of negotiating and a 98-percent strike authorization vote.
PCPSPA workers are highly trained and highly skilled, beyond simply needing to be really good at skiing and trained in emergency medicine. They also need to know the mountain, to be able to read snow conditions with a fine eye and understand the regional avalanche dynamics. Park City happens to be the largest ski area in the United States, making the job extra demanding.
In other words, these workers are not replaceable, though management surely wishes they were. The Vail Resorts propaganda line, taken up by many a willing dupe, is that the ski patrol workers are fundamentally unserious dirtbags, people who don’t work to make money but rather get paid to go skiing all day. “People are fed up with the years and years of a narrative where, because your job has elements that people consider fun, your labor is worthless,” PCPSPA president Kate Lips told Powder.
The framework of fun is a useful one here. That’s the essence of skiing, the thing that keeps people returning to increasingly expensive ski towns, risking injury, and getting their kids into it. I grew up skiing in the Sierras at a time when you could go to the grocery store or REI and get discounted lift tickets, and if you left Sacramento after breakfast, you could be on the first lift at Sugar Bowl at nine, eat your PB&J in the lodge, and be home by six for less than $50, all in. It was possible to ski as a normal person, is my point, in a way that doesn’t meaningfully exist anymore. The cost of a single-day ticket at Park City is $328, and, as is the case with many Vail Resorts operations, they funnel you to outlandishly expensive cafeteria lunches. This brings us to the Epic Pass and the true villain of the story: private equity.
In 1997, Vail was bought out of bankruptcy and taken public by Apollo Management, which was operated by longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Leon Black. The new owner rapidly expanded Vail’s footprint, buying up resorts and other ski-town fixtures like hotels and vacation rentals; Vail now owns 42 ski resorts and has a market cap of nearly $7 billion. The engine of its growth is the Epic Pass, a cross-resort pass that allows skiers to visit any Vail Resorts mountain. As an excellent Slate story from Dec. 2023 details, the private equity firm KSL Capital Partners formed the Alterra Mountain Company to launch the Ikon Pass in 2017, and the two competing companies control most of skiing in North America.
Passes have totally changed the consumptive dynamics of skiing, as they roughly cost between three and four times the price of a single-day ticket. It’s a good value play for skiers who intend to ski longer than two weekends, and this year, 75 percent of skiers will access the mountain with a pass. By jacking up single-day tickets, resorts push skiers to the pass and price out lower-income skiers altogether.
The pass-based model allows Vail Resorts and Alterra to lock in revenue ahead of the season and hedge against climate change. As snowfall becomes increasingly erratic across the Mountain West and in the Sierras, any ski resort model that depends on single-day tickets will be at the whim of the weather gods. But if you sell millions of $1,000 passes to people for whom that’s a negligible amount of money, you’re good either way.
The vertical integration at play here extends beyond the slopes themselves, as Vail, KSL, and other conglomerates have expanded their control over every aspect of the skiing experience, from real estate to retail to dining. The ski town as we know it is forever changed, more of a corporate fiction than anything else.
The result of all that consolidation is that the practice of skiing is increasingly incidental to the owners and operators of most ski resorts in North America. This is classic Thielian Zero to One monopolism, and the degradation of the skiing experience for both workers and skiers is a fundamental byproduct of Vail and KSL taking control of the industry and extracting the substantial margins they can find within it. The duopoly that controls skiing does not face any meaningful outside competition because mountains are a limited, totally captured “resource” and the buy-in cost is so prohibitive that nobody small can even survive against them, let alone fight back.
But there’s a limit to how much they can get away with: None of this works without a functional ski patrol. That’s a lot more than can be said for the private-equity suits fighting to keep its workers underpaid and unhappy.
