marauders wrote:Heaven forbid those needing recreational opportunities be relegated to using their legs and lungs to explore the wilderness unaided by ski lifts, restaurants and warming huts.

It's pretty funny that someone got the idea that the Meadow Chutes are 50-60 degrees. Maybe we should try to convince them that they do not want the liability of their customers skiing 60 degree slopes.

I'd like to see Silver Fork included in the Twin Peaks Wilderness Area.

Solitude claims that it cannot meet future demand for recreation on public lands. Why is that Solitude's responsibility? And how does putting a $70 per person price tag on access to public land that is currently free constitute an expansion of opportunity, for anyone but the most affluent?

Silver Fork offers the safest and most accessible snowmobile-free backcountry skiing in a significant north facing drainage in the entire Wasatch. If Solitude gets Silver Fork, and Alta gets a lift up Flagstaff Moutain as it has proposed, then there will be practically nowhere left in SL county to ski tour during elevated avalanche danger except the lower-elevation hills north of Big Cottonwood Canyon road and a couple of spots in the Brighton Lakes area, assuming Alta doesn't also completely take over Grizzly Gulch eventually. The existing Wilderness areas are steep and rugged and for the most part and for the skill levels of most people only safe when avalanche danger is relatively low. To not have access to what little of the alpine terrain of the Cottonwood Canyons is neither advanced and dangerous nor already monopolized by the ski resorts puts a suffocating squeeze on the options available to the backcountry user group. This squeeze is further compounded by the heli-skiing operations that crowd us, sometimes endanger our safety, and destroy our prized sense of being in the "backcountry." There is simply not space for further resort expansion in the Wasatch. All user groups, not just resorts, face increasing demand for fixed and limited acreage.

More to the point of Solitude's argument, I read their proposal and I can't make any logical sense out of how they can appeal to their business under-performance as justification for measures to make their resort more "attractive", at the same time that they argue that future demand for skiing will skyrocket such that they will not be able to meet it. Seems like they will make the maximum profit possible for their level of capital investment, UNLESS they expand. In the short term, at least. In the long term, they have to count on getting back into this exact same "dilemma" in order to maximize return on the expansion investment. Which they no doubt will, since the population will continue to increase. What then, do we give the resorts Days Fork too? And then Cardiff? Where does this insanity end? How about right here and now.