It snowed last night; it’s going to snow all weekend. That’s mountain weather for you but all of a sudden my inbox is full of ski area opening dates and news. People, today was the first day of Autumn! If you’re getting excited about the recent storms, put a lid on it.
Having snow on the ground is simply a tease for the local resorts to hype up their advertising and get you to think winter skiing (and start spending money on a vacation). Nothing’s open until Thanksgiving so you can’t ski new snow anyway but who cares?! Further, there are no predictions of a successful snow year tied to snowfall in September.
Photo by Lisa Densmore Ballard
I guarantee you that it will all melt next week. We’re still rock climbing and mountain biking around here. Only a few dumb-asses are hiking for one run on snow-covered grass so please stop sending me your resorts-covered-in-snow photos. I have nearly two months for pre-season training.
As of Friday 9/22/17, we still have 56 days until the lifts start spinning in Utah.
It’s a total Catch-22. You get a resort job and there’s no place to live. It’s getting harder and more expensive to find a seasonal Park City rental. Landlords want a year lease and solo tenants, and tenants want to live three to a room, from November-March. Impasse, much? Oh, and we’d like it to be $700/mo or less.
Let’s Get Realistic
Even if you aren’t looking for your own place it’s going to cost you at least $700+ a month. It’s even more if you want to live alone; and with a pet.
Deer Valley and Park City offer employee housing but it’s scarce and dormlike. Plus, if you aren’t a ski instructor, liftee, etc. you’re not welcome to it. So now, you might be pulling your hair out trying to find a Park City rental; especially if you aren’t local.
Where do you start to look?
Here’s the bad news- you should have started looking for a Park City rental back in August. What the hell were you waiting for? The right moment? The perfect match of charm and price? The good news is you still have about two months before it becomes slim pickings and desperation. I like to start leases December 1 because I know how easy it is to find renters. As a landlord, I know I can get my place rented in two days at that time. But I’m not on a busline, and it’s a one-year lease. The busline/month-to-monthers are gone by November.
Tips For Finding A Park City Rental
Almost Forgot This Pointer
One other thing I forgot to mention was to contact the HR departments at Deer Valley and Park City. They often will keep a folder of available rentals.
If all else fails, save your money for a reliable car, rent a place in Salt Lake City and commute.
The next fee free day for the National Park Service is coming up! During ten days of the year, all National Park Service sites that charge an entrance fee will offer free admission to everyone. “National parks are known for their priceless beauty,” said National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis. “They are a bargain anytime but on these ten days in 2017, they really will be priceless. We want everyone to visit their national parks and the fee free days provide extra incentive to experience these amazing places.”
During the fee free days, all National Park Service sites will waive their entrance fees for all visitors. Usually, 124 of the 413 national parks charge entrance fees that range from $3 to $30. (The other 289 sites do not have entrance fees.) FYI-The entrance fee waiver for the fee-free days does not cover amenity or user fees for things such as camping, boat launches, transportation, or special tours.
If you’ve never been to Arches, now’s your chance! Get two National Parks from one town, Moab, Utah, and drink good beer to boot.
Mark your calendar for these entrance fee–free dates in Arches and Canyonlands in 2017:
•January 16: Martin Luther King Jr. Day
•February 20: Presidents’ Day
•April 15-16 and 22-23: Weekends of National Park Week
•August 25: National Park Service Birthday
•September 30: National Public Lands Day
•November 11-12: Veterans Day Weekend
To continue the national park adventure beyond these fee free days, the annual $80 America the Beautiful National Parks and Federal Recreation Lands Pass allows unlimited entrance to more than 2,000 federal recreation areas, including all national parks,. There are also free or discounted passes available for senior citizens, current military members, fourth grade students, and disabled citizens.
The National Park System includes more than 84 million acres and is comprised of 413 sites including national parks, national historical parks, national monuments, national recreation areas, national battlefields, and national seashores. There is at least one national park in every state.
Last year, 307 million people visited a national park. They spent $16.9 billion which supported 295,000 jobs and had a $32 billion impact on the U.S. economy.
p.s. Dogs are not allowed on the trails in Arches or Canyonslands but you can still take them to see natural arches.
What began as a one-off for outdoor gear brand Cotopaxi in 2014, the 24-hour adventure scavenger hunt that takes place in over 50 North American locations, circles back to its home state for Questival 2017, and there’s still time to register!
This zany, all-consuming trek gets teams of 2-6 friends to complete some 300+ “challenges” (from doing a yoga pose in the wilderness to give a dollar to a homeless person) while earning points, bonding with teammates and checking off adventures from your bucklist.
The Questival event kicks off with a welcome party Friday July 28, 2017, 6 p.m., with live music and food trucks, where you get your list of challenges, the Cotopaxi swag backpacks and a “totem.” As you complete a challenge you take a photo with the totem to prove you’ve succeeded and upload it to the free Questival app. Different challenges are worth a certain number of points.
The categories of Questival 2017 challenges range from adventure and survival to service and social media. You can ride a slide at a public park for two points or drive to a national park for 30 points. You’ll wrack up the most points by completing the outdoor challenges over the urban ones. There is time to get a little sleep as well. You gain additional points by turning off the app from 1 a.m.- 5 a.m.
The more challenges you complete, the more points you earn. (Here is the list of last year’s challenges). The top ten point-scoring teams will then move onto “peer judging”. All Questival 2017 competitors will swipe left or right on photos and videos submitted by teams. Back in the day, winning teams could get an all-expense paid trip to Machu Picchu. Now they get prize packs with airline vouchers and gear worth approx. $4200 per team.
In the end, you’re competing against thousands of your neighbors in a fun, friendly, albeit frenetic, event so even if you don’t come close to one of those 10 spots you’ll come out a winner, learning more about your city, your friends and your stamina.
To here learn more about Cotopaxi and Questival 2017.
Outdoor industry executive leaders met last week and came up with the brilliant news that the Outdoor Retailer Show should be based in Denver. First off, big surprise. Not. With the SIA Snow Show and OR Winter Market merging for 2018 and beyond, it was just a matter of time before the newsies came out and said what we all knew was coming.
The board peeps like Beaver Theodosakis, PrAna, Kim Miller, SCARPA North America, Dan Nordstrom Outdoor Research, Casey Sheahan, Keen Footwear, Dawson Wheeler, Rock Creek Outfitters joined together to claim that the “long-term survival” of the OR show rests at the Colorado Convention Center.
For decades, the Snow Show and OR were the events for manufacturers to sign multi-thousand-dollar orders from retailers anxious to load up on next season’s skis, boards, boots, outerwear and accessories. But as purchasing dates moved up to November and December, a January Show became more of an expensive meet and greet and grumblings strayed toward the downfall of both shows.
The recent love for the Mile High City makes you wonder if Denver or the State of Colorado offered a sweetheart deal like the charity outreach they did to lure SIA away from Vegas. Rumor swirled that Denver offered to host the show for 10 years for free. The statement released on May 26, 2017, did mention “an aggressive package of economic incentives from the state of Colorado and the city of Denver” with workable dates available. The Snow Show was supposed to move to Dec. 5, 2017 but that isn’t happening for this winter season.*
Of course, it makes sense for Colorado to woo the outdoor industry. It puts heads in beds, generates at least a month’s worth of media exposure and floods the airport, highways, and restaurants. Who goes to Denver in the winter? Nobody. Visitors fly in and travel on to the various Colorado ski resorts…HOURS away. You can’t say the same for Salt Lake City. People STAY in Salt Lake to ski. When SIA hosts the on snow demo, folks have to book a second hotel stay at Copper Mountain; not the case during the OR On Snow.
The one thing OR had over the others was the enthusiasm and networking party. SIA had it in Vegas. Lost it in Denver. The folks that came to SLC may have bitched that they couldn’t find housing but no one complained about the powder or vibe. People came to the Show because they loved it, not necessarily because they sold gear that week. Hundreds stayed on, to ski or, in the summer, to play HARD. Again, you can drink great beer in Denver but the commute to outdoor play ain’t even close to what you get with a 20-minute drive from SLC.
Perhaps OR will bring that vibe to the Snow Show and Denver. Or perhaps, the reverse will happen and it’ll bring ‘em both down. At that point, the regional shows just may sprout and flourish.
Bustling hall of OREmpty hall of SIA
Trade shows are notoriously fragile. The SuperShow, Comdex, MAGIC, Action Sports Retailer have all crumbled. Many folks in the outdoor industry had been speculating for years about OR’s fate and that perhaps it would be supplanted with such regional shows where manufacturers and reps would meet with retailers specific to the market they were attending. It’s a more personalized approach and it makes sense from a buyer’s standpoint. (If you are a shop in the east, traveling west to meet for four days during peak shopping time is a hardship).
“There are many alternatives to participating in an expensive and time consuming show that falls at the end of the booking season. It would be foolhardy indeed to create additional reasons for participants to re-consider their options,” the OIA brain trusters threatened when talks about moving the Show to Las Vegas arose. If only those minds had visited Vegas for the SIA show when it was there for 37 YEARS.
VEGAS ROCKED! It was WAAAAY cheaper to fly to, stay at and party at. Sure, you couldn’t ski during the winter show but it was a sweet break to wear a t-shirt and shorts in the middle of January. The Snow Show was at its Zenith and has suffered exponential attendance attrition since its move to Denver. In fact, a reasonable Google hunt seems to indicate that SIA has stopped reporting Snow Show attendance numbers and even put out a release that they were focusing on “quality over quantity.”
OIA recognized in their statement that Utah has a unique formula of outdoor amazingness and business but because of the Beehive State’s political lameass they felt forced to call their own bluff. The headliner brands at OR – Black Diamond, Patagonia, The North Face, etc.- had long threatened to leave the show if Utah wasn’t going to support environmental protection initiatives. OIA met with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and it was obvious he would continue to fight to transfer federal lands to the state, nullify the Antiquities Act, and undo Bears Ears National Monument. Liberals basically begged the governor to support Utah’s $12 billion outdoor recreation industry by protecting public lands. But Herbert is backing the lawsuit to overturn Bears Ears and reduce the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument- both valuable pieces of property to oil dripping companies.
Peter Metcalf, founder of Utah-based Black Diamond Equipment, told the Washington Post “Utah is the birther state of the most anti-stewardship, anti-public-lands policy in the country and, conversely, I would say Colorado ranks very highly as the opposite.”
A move to Denver is a political one. It’s unfortunate that OIA saw yanking an event that rakes in $45 million for Utah’s economy as their only viable option. At least when they were here, making threats, it created some checks and push back for the public land grabs the State might consider. Like Metcalf said, Colorado doesn’t need help. When a marriage goes bad and the spouse up and leaves for good, who ultimately suffers? The children. Salt Lake, you F@#$ed up royally. OIA SO DID YOU!!
*The Annual Snow Show will be held Jan. 25-28, 2018.
