Salt Lake Tribune Article, October 2006

Plan would link Wasatch ski resorts

By Patty Henetz and Mike Gorrell, The Salt Lake Tribune

If Utah's ski resorts ever tripled the number of skiers they see each year, they'd tie Colorado's 2005-2006 record - and likely be suffering the same kind of transportation gridlock resort-bound motorists regularly endure on Interstate 70's Rocky Mountain traverse.

That's according to a memo circulated to the "25 most influential people in government, tourism and the ski industry," who will meet Nov. 3 with Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. at the Capitol. The meeting was arranged at the request of Sen. Carlene Walker to brainstorm the latest proposal to link Big and Little Cottonwood canyons with Park City: tunnels and roads with snow sheds to connect Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Brighton, Park City Mountain Resort, The Canyons and Deer Valley.

Such a scheme would allow skiers to drive between mountaintop resorts instead of up and down canyon roads or Interstate 80, already subject to heavy traffic. Walker, a Cottonwood Heights Republican, member of the Senate transportation committee and proponent of private investment in toll roads, was on vacation Monday and unavailable for an interview. But Huntsman spokesman Mike Mower said the governor had nothing to do with creating the talking points and said it was "premature to have this agenda that said the governor is open to reviewing this proposal."

The memo came from the office of Jeff Holt, vice president of Goldman Sachs' San Francisco office and a frequent contributor to Utah transportation and project finance discussions. It says the projects, dubbed the AltaBright Tunnel and CottonPark Interconnect, would tie the seven resorts in the tri-canyon area "into one 7-resort Megaplex." "It will be possible to drive from any one resort to any other in less than 20 minutes," the memo says, adding the project would allow Utah "to seriously challenge Colorado for total resort experience . . . This type of grouping and packaging mimics Swiss/Italian Alps models."

Ski Utah President Nathan Rafferty said the ski industry didn't propose the meeting, but welcomed it as a way to plan ahead to avoid the kind of problems Colorado is having getting skiers to Vail, Aspen, Breckenridge and other resorts along the serpentine I-70. "They're saying, 'Are we going to widen the freeway or build a monorail or some kind of train?' They're already way behind," Rafferty said. "We cannot afford to pretend our population isn't growing and the number of visitors to our resorts isn't increasing. Those canyons [Big Cottonwood and Little Cottonwood] can hold only a finite amount of traffic." Ski Utah reported 4 million "skier days" for this past winter, an all-time record. A recent University of Utah study said the ski industry contributes $811 million a year in direct spending annually to the state's economy.

A memo sent to those invited to the meeting says Utah could see 6 million skier days. The memo doesn't identify a source for the estimate; Rafferty said it wasn't Ski Utah. But based on that estimate, the memo goes on to say the tunnels are the preferred method of adding skier capacity and reducing diesel emissions by 40 percent - another unsourced number. The single-bore tunnel between Alta and Brighton would cost $250 million or less, according to the memo. The Guardsman Pass seasonal road could be protected by snow sheds or a tunnel could be bored under it for $50 million to $150 million. Tolls, special finance districts and federal dollars would be the revenue and funding sources.

Utah Department of Transportation spokeswoman Bethany Eller said the agency's deputy director, Carlos Braceras, will attend the Nov. 3 meeting. However, UDOT hasn't been asked to do any engineering and has no money to offer the project. "It's just an idea right now," Eller said. But not a new one. The idea is "nothing that hasn't happened lots of times before in the last 20 or 30 or 40 years, said Alta General Manager Onno Wieringa.

Save Our Canyons board member, historian and author Alexis Kelner said the proposal as presented in the memo was another in a list of resort-interconnect schemes "that would destroy the character of each individual little resort." In 1945, Kelner said, there was a road planned between Alta and Brighton over Catherine Pass. In the 1960s, when he worked for the Salt Lake City water department, there was a proposal to dig a tunnel between Alta and Brighton. The tunnel idea resurfaced during the mid-1980s when Kelner served on the Olympics feasibility committee. He recalled crashing a meeting called by then-Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson to review a proposal to dig a tunnel that would connect to the ski areas via vertical elevators.

Lisa Smith, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Save Our Canyons, says the group would rather not increase canyon capacity. "The Wasatch-Cache National Forest is one of the most heavily used in the country," she said. Boring tunnels and building roads would put pressure on the critical watershed. Besides, she said, "the last thing we would want the Wasatch to be identified with is a 'megaplex.' " Rafferty agreed. "We don't feel that terminology is good. That's not advantageous to us. We have seven resorts that want to maintain distinct personalities. One big resort is not the aim."