How much would you pay to skin up a groomer? How much peril would you face for that sweet burn? Aspen and Vail are ready to find out.
Aspen SkiCo welcomes uphillers, checkbooks, Vail seeks to deter
During the surge of a global pandemic, resort ski touring has certainly become the hottest thing since sliced quarantine sourdough. Savvy resorts from all over Colorado have rushed in to take advantage and the search to calculate the capitalist supply and demand threshold is hot. The two biggest names in skiing east and west of the divide, Vail and Aspen have stayed notably quiet… until now.
The negotiations were heightened early this winter when a survey went out to local uphillers in the Roaring Fork Valley with one of the questions being “What would you pay for an uphill pass at Aspen’s Four Mountains?” This obvious trap was avoided by most, but one unwitting survey participant must have given the answer $300 per day, or $3000 for the season, because that is exactly the price that is now listed on A$$penSnowma$$.com website.
Interestingly enough, Vail has failed to respond with their usual price increase to outdo the notoriously expensive Skico resort, instead opting for a more sinister determinant. Reports one Vail area skinner, “After the Aspen announcement, we were expecting to see daily uphill passes in the $500 range at least. Instead we were blown away during our after work skin to see literally hundreds of winch cats trolling the mountain.”
It seems clear that Vail is to spare no expense in order to deter the loathed resort uphiller from taking to the slope, but at what risk to personal safety and impending lawsuits? When we reached out to a Vail representative, he explained “99% of the winch cats are actually holographic projections, the brilliance of the plan is that you never know which one is real.”
Winch cats use cables attached to points high above where the cat is operating and have long been the terror of the evening skin. These cables are oftentimes buried under the snow and can spring up when the cable is loaded at the right angle. Although this exists as a serious threat to the ski tourer, the equal threat of losing skinning privilege and then being trolled on social media also exists.
“All holographic winch cats are equipped with proximity sensors. If a skinner comes within 400 meters of one, all uphill traffic will be shut down for three weeks,” our Vail source announced. “Not only will this help to regulate these pests from going uphill, but we also hope the social media deterrent of calling each other ‘tourists’ and ‘noobs’ will act as a form of self regulation.”
Back in Aspen, we approached one yoga-pant-clad skinny-ski skier ascending a groomed slope and asked about the exorbitantly high uphill prices.
“Well, it’s still cheaper than a season pass AND a gym membership” he said, “plus the heated gondola cabs give me time to rest, drink champagne and change a layer on the download before my next lap.”
When asked if the market could really bear this kind of price increase from what has long been free, one SkiCo executive was quoted saying with a shrug, “It’s Aspen…someone will pay for it.”
Although at time of publication there is no official news, there are rumors of a KITS (Kick In The Shins) Pass, that will reportedly make uphilling in Colorado more affordable. The hope is a collective pass will soon be offered that brings dozens of ski areas under one roof for an uphill ticket that reduces the price to the $2000 range. In case you thought you were far away from waiting in line for your chance to go uphill, the future might be closer than you think.
While most of the WildSnow backcountry skiing blog posts are best attributed to a single author, some work well as done by the group.
13 comments
I wonder what they’ll charge for parking. I’ll need a place to put my Voltswagon.
April Fools?
Living in Colorado and being a skier must be like being a peasant in France in the days before The Revolution. There are some smaller resorts tucked fairly away from the I-70 corridor that have some semblance of affordability, but the rest have turned the mountains into a place that is a picture perfect replica of greed gone wild.
It took me a couple of paragraphs to get it! Yoga pant clad skinny skier!
It wasn’t until after I went to Aspen’s website to see what they charge to ride chairlifts before I got it!
A solid offering for April 1st and on a serious note I must say I’m looking forward to the perfumed, yoga clad skinny skiers going back to their normal routine, not including skinning, since Covid is ending…or so I hope!
Covid is ending……………………………April fools! Actually this makes me sad and I look forward to having a better idea of when it will be over and some form of “normal” returns..
I was 100% taken in until I got to the word “holographic”.
Will they trade dish washing for uphill pass? I’m credentialed, though sometimes I don’t show it.
That looks like Crested Butte?
I offered a chocolate to a late skinner, at Jay Peak as the lifts were closing this afternoon. He would have a quiet, empty run to ski down.. Where an uphill, skin up anytime-you-want pass is only $50.00. For the season.
But I warned him about the Holographic winch cats.
That would be an amusing parody but for the rather unamusing reality that Vail banned all operational hours skinning at all of its Eastern resorts this year, including ski areas that had previously allowed operational hours skinning for decades under prior owners.
Fortunately the world of resort uphilling hasn’t gone entirely to the dogs and this was all a farce, as per WildSnow April Fool’s Day tradition. Earlier this season, SkiCo did distribute a survey that asked how much people would be willing to pay for an uphill pass, which made some of us a little nervous. No plans to charge yet, though. As for the holographic winch cats, let’s hope they stay solidly in the imagination…
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