Proposed Solitude expansion

[rsmith]

http://www.sltrib.com/Business/ci_13860390

Probably won't/shouldn't happen, but it would propel Solitude into stronger competition with the big boys. It's powder potential would nearly double with the new terrain in Silver Fork.

Interesting that Alta/Solitude are conspiring for an interconnect (and makes you question Alta's true intent with a lift up Flagstaff).

 

[Marc_C]

The expansion and an Alta connection would just be so cool! I'm all for it!

 

[Skrad]

Utah does not suffer from a lack of lift-serviced terrain.

 

[Marc_C]

Utah does not suffer from a lack of lift-serviced terrain.

No, it doesn't. But more in the form of interconnects between the Cottonwood resorts would be better.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Response to the SL Tribune article seems mostly negative. From a personal point of view, I'm with MarcC as I'd love to ski the terrain and have a lift interconnect to LCC. But I'd like to hear salida's opinion, since he does a lot of both resort and backcountry. Is accessible backcountry being whittled down too much? I appreciate that the Cottonwood microclimate with such abundant snow is actually a rather small geographic area. But some of the environmental groups are in the BANANA category. Salida is probably best placed among those of us on FTO to assess the tradeoff.

 

[Marc_C]

Is accessible backcountry being whittled down too much?

Well, there's accessible in the sense of it being incredibly close to the city. There's also accessible in the sense that in the Cottonwoods, particularly LCC, you can park at the base of your uphill skin track thanks to the road. Doing the same in the Uintas takes either a snow machine or a metric crapload of XC travel.

However a lot of the locals that complain about the loss of accessible backcountry in the Wasatch are using resort lifts to access it, so it's somewhat disingenuous if not outright hypocritical to rail about resort and lift expansion. Even if not using resort lifts, the canyon roads cut out a lot of the effort of getting to the interesting backcountry.

I feel some of Snowbird's long range expansion plans are as interesting as and possibly even more viable than the Solitude proposal and Alta's Flagstaff lift possibility.