As the snow fell deep and the holiday crowds gathered Dec. 27 at the largest ski area in the country, the patrollers at the Vail Resorts-owned Park City Mountain Resort went on strike. It is the first time in modern history that ski patrollers have walked off the job as the ranks of unionized resort workers swell to record numbers.
And the calamitous result of the now weeklong strike detailed in hundreds of social media posts — long lift lines, injured skiers left unattended and patrollers rallying in solidarity across the West — will have sweeping impacts on contract negotiations underway and set to begin in Colorado this year.
The Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association on Dec. 13, Dec. 16, Dec. 17, and Dec. 30 filed unfair labor practice complaints against Vail Resorts, alleging the company had unilaterally changed the conditions of employment, was negotiating in bad faith and was using coercive threats and actions during the negotiation process with patrollers.
Vail Resorts has issued statements that the strike has had a limited impact on operations at Park City as it sends ski patrol managers — who are not represented by the growing resort-worker union — from other ski areas to the Utah ski area.
The roughly 90 full-time ski patrollers at Keystone filed similar complaints against Vail Resorts in October, alleging the company was refusing to bargain in good faith for a new contract. The Keystone patrollers, who voted to unionize in April 2024, are in the middle of a monthslong negotiation with Vail Resorts, pushing for a starting wage of $23 an hour and merit-pay increases for veteran patrollers.
The Keystone patrol union in a Dec. 18 statement said the company’s most recent counterproposal “unreasonably removed standard contract terms” the company had already offered to other unionized ski patrols.
On Dec. 18, about 60 patrollers at Keystone staged a demonstration that represented solidarity with the Park City patrol as well as the Keystone patrollers’ “intolerance for Vail Resorts stalling negotiations and denying Keystone ski patrollers their earned annual merit increase.”
In 2022, Vail Resorts increased its starting hourly wage for all employees to $20 and Keystone patrollers bumped to $21.50 an hour, which includes incentive pay for being certified as emergency medical technicians.
“We took the $21 number from 2022 and plugged into the government’s Consumer Price Index and that’s how we got $23. So basically we are asking to match inflation,” said Jake Randall, a six-year patroller who represents Keystone’s ski patrol union.
Park City patrollers also are seeking a $23 starting wage as well as a similar bump in hourly pay for longtime patrollers.
Randall said it’s “hard to say” if Vail Resorts will consider the impact of the Park City Mountain patroller strike when the company arrives at its Jan. 8 bargaining session with Keystone patrollers. The Park City patrollers have been working without a contract for several months, so Randall suspects that negotiations with a larger group of patrollers at a busier resort may take precedence for the company.
Lift mechanics at Vail Resorts-owned Crested Butte Mountain Resort also are negotiating a new contract with the company. Patrollers at Breckenridge and Crested Butte Mountain will negotiate new contracts later this year.
“The tone has certainly shifted with all this attention on Park City and hopefully that is reflected in our meeting,” Randall said. “Our last meeting was a month ago and we have not heard anything. We are still negotiating over parking and uniforms. But our unit is getting pretty restless. Everyone is wondering if we will do the same thing as the Park City unit. Our members are pretty fired up and we are ready to walk out if we need to.”
The outcome of the negotiations at Park City will play a large role in negotiations that are upcoming or underway at Breckenridge, Keystone and Crested Butte Mountain, said Ryan Dineen, a Breckenridge ski patroller who helped organize ski patrollers there into a union in 2021.
“I do hope Vail takes notice that we are so much more unified than we have ever been,” Dineen said. “The collaboration and sharing among ski patrollers across the country is at an all-time high. The solidarity among patrollers is really shining through right now and that is truly unique.”
Instagram is flooded with posts showing long lift lines at Park City Mountain Resort. There are photos of injured skiers being tended to by other skiers with banners describing slow response from ski patrollers. There are posts identifying — by name and “Scab number” — the managers and patrollers from other ski areas who flew to Utah to help Vail Resorts run patrol operations at Park City during the strike.
Several posts point to the salary of Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten Lynch, which includes base pay of $1.1 million and $4.9 million in pay-for-performance cash and shares of company stock, which were awarded because the company hit annual earnings targets.
Other ski patrols from across the country are organizing fundraisers to support their Park City Mountain Resort colleagues.
“There would be more food on the tables of ski industry workers if the ski industry were not so focused on their stock price and their dividend disbursements and more focus on the people who make it possible,” read one Instagram post quoting Park City Mountain patroller Max Magill, who also serves as president of the United Mountain Workers union representing 1,110 workers at 13 ski resorts under the Communications Workers of America Local 7781. The resort worker union could grow if the 57 pro patrollers at Alterra Mountain Co.-owned Arapahoe Basin vote to unionize later this month.
Ski patrollers worry about morale as managers leave for Park City
On Tuesday, ski patrollers from Breckenridge, Crested Butte and Keystone sent a letter to Vail Resorts CEO Lynch, saying the company’s “tactics of pressuring, coercing and intimidating skilled patrol leaders to travel to Park City” to replace striking patrollers has “caused irreparable harm to both your patrol labor force and patrol management” at the company’s ski areas.
The letter said patrol leaders across the company’s network of ski areas face “a no-win situation” and the company’s request that managers travel to Utah implies “that their careers and livelihoods are at risk if they do not support the company’s demand” to replace striking ski patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort.
Vail Resorts stock has been trading at an eight-year low — not counting the March 2020 dip when resorts closed due to the pandemic. Since the patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort went on strike, shares of Vail Resorts’ stock have fallen more than $20 a share to around $177. The company’s stock was trading for more than $300 a share until late 2021, when a labor crisis triggered by the pandemic left North America’s largest operator facing widespread criticism when it was unable to open ski terrain.
Analysts who cover Vail Resorts reached by The Colorado Sun said it was unlikely that the strike at Park City would have a similar impact, but they said it is playing a role in keeping the company’s stock price low. The analysts, who said they could not speak on the record due to compliance issues, said that while revenue at the Park City ski area was likely down for the busy holiday week, the bigger concern for Vail Resorts is if the less-than-ideal holiday-week experience causes skiers to avoid buying the Epic Pass next season.
One analyst suspects Vail Resorts “is playing hardball with the Park City patrol union as there are other contract negotiations in progress or coming up,” he said in an email. “Give an inch, everyone gets an inch or more. To be clear, I’m not saying that patrollers do not deserve more pay, rather just noting contract negotiation tactics.”
On Wednesday, Park City Mountain Resort had less than 20% of its terrain open. The 7,300-acre resort recently removed an online display that typically reports the percentage of terrain that is open, but Thursday, after 31 inches of new snow in the past week, the ski area said 24 of its 41 lifts were open and 80 of its 350 trails. On Monday, the resort said it was suspending sales of daily lift tickets, making Park City Mountain Resort only open to skiers who had already purchased passes and lift tickets. (The company sold 2.3 million of its advanced-purchase passes and tickets for the 2024-25 ski season.)
Deidra Walsh, the chief operating officer at Park City Mountain Resort, said in a recorded and published statement Monday that the ski area’s crew “has not been able to open as much terrain as we would like to” but pointed to below-average snowfall as well as the patroller strike for the limited amount of open terrain. Walsh said the resort was prioritizing opening beginner and intermediate terrain with delays to opening expert terrain.
In a statement, Walsh said the company has deployed a “Patrol Support Team” with patrollers recruited from other ski areas. She said Park City has “invested significantly” in its ski patrol, with wages increasing 50% in the past four seasons. The company has proposed increasing wages another 4% and offering $1,600 per patroller for equipment costs.
Margaux Klingensmith, a six-year patroller at Park City Mountain Resort and manager at the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association, said the patrol union met with Vail Resorts and a mediator this week and the two sides have reached a tentative agreement on 24 of 27 contract issues. The remaining issues include wages, benefits and the duration of the contract.
“It’s incredibly frustrating to see that the company has decided to try to mitigate the impact of this strike rather than coming to the table with a fair contract,” said Klingensmith, noting that patrollers first proposed the new contract in September and it took 55 days for Vail Resorts to offer a counterproposal.
“The strike could have been avoided if we had seen movement in negotiations months ago,” she said. “If the company negotiated in good faith, we would have had a contract before the season started. I really hope your unions in Colorado have more luck with faster negotiations than we did.”