Utah's Big Ski Boom
And Empire of Pain Book Review
If you’ve felt like the good ol days of skiing in Utah were better, you might be right. In the 2022/2023 winter season, there was an all-time record 7.1 million ski days in Utah, an increase of 22% over the year prior.
And while this might make sense given Utah also got a record amount of snowfall last season, this doesn’t explain why the horribly low snowfall season two years ago was still the previous all time high in ski days.
Too Crowded?
Most people like to point their fingers towards Covid as being the main introduction of new skiiers (and Jerry’s) into the sport. And indeed, the data shows a big uptick in skiing visitors after 2020.
But Alterra might top Covid as the prime reason why skiing has gotten so popular in Utah.
In 2018, Alterra acquired Solitude and added Brighton, Snowbird, and Alta to it’s Ikon pass in order to compete directly with Epic that owned Park City. Then in 2022 they added Snowbasin to the full pass and totaled six different resorts within an hour driving distance of Salt Lake City (including Deer Valley).
Most growth in ski travel is seen by the Rocky Mountain region getting much more popular over the past year even as other regions have flatlined or even gone down as popular skiing locations.
Add on the ability of remote work, and now you have the perfect reason for people in different parts of the country to nowspend anywhere from a few days to a whole season in the state with the greatest snow on Earth.
The Secret is Out
If you browse r/SaltLakeCity enough, you’ll notice a common theme across complaints across housing prices and the overcrowding of ski resorts.
While most locals can complain all they want, it’s pretty clear that the secret is out. Salt Lake City will continue to see a rise in visitors as skiing becomes a bigger part of their overall GDP. The city is one of the most affordable ski towns in the United States even as housing costs have grown by 50% over the last 5 years.
Earlier this month I visited Salt Lake City for a ski trip for the fourth year in a row. In an effort to curb overcrowding, both Brighton and Solitude enacted parking reservations for all visitors, making planning ski vacations a little bit harder and also placing a cap on the amount of traffic at the resort and number of cars going up through the notoriously dangerous and slow Big Cottonwood Canyon. But Brighton added improvements, by upgrading their Crest line lift making it high speed and adding six seats. And adding another lodge at the base of the Snake Creek Express.
This left Snowbird as the only resort now in the Cottonwood Canyons to not have reservations. Nor have they truly updated anything this year, with lines at Mineral Basin on a typical weekend reaching over 30 minutes per run.
It’ll be interesting to see how Utah continues to deal with growing pains to keep up with the influx in demand from visitors. While there are some motions in the work with Alterra is planning on expanding Deer Valley to almost three times it’s existing size, one might wonder if more ski resorts will begin to also try to deal with mitigating the overcrowding that now exists as skiing popularity increases.
Book Review: Empire of Pain
Before Oxycontin, the U.S. didn’t have a opioid criss. And then twenty years after it’s introduction, and we have a very bad one.
It’s easy to currently conflate oxycontin as a harmful opioid. But that’s pure hindsight bias. In actuality only 20 years prior, we thought oxycontin was the main treatment method for almost all pain medication.
Empire of Pain tracks the main family involved in producing Oxycontin and points them out as the main causer of the current U.S. opioid crisis. In first starting with Arthur Sackler and his brothers, the first generation family of immigrants that made money off of marketing pharmeceuticals, they track the entire three generations as they make their conquest through unchecked capitalism and greed.
There is an undercurrent of distate for the entire Sackler family throughout the book. It’s one, interesting to see how the author doesn’t let any member from the family off the hook on almost anything. And it’s a constant reminder that it’s harder for me as the reader to distinguish what lines and scales of evil the family and company runs on. There is probably core moral differences across the Sacklers, Truman, Kissinger, Stalin, or Hitler, even if the effects of their actions caused a similar level scale of devastation.
At the end of the day, the main message I understood was that the style of Silicon Valley and startup monopolizing techniques and hacks were maybe introduced by pharmaceautical companies way before the current age of SV. For example, the book highlights similar aggressive first to market / lawyer up later techniques that Uber also got in trouble for in the early 2010s. And while Purdue Pharma mostly got away with it for twenty years plus, you come away wondering if they escaped punishment mostly because of their timing before the spread of the internet and ubiquitous global news.
P.S. if you liked this post, please leave a like on Substack or comment. It helps me give me feedback if what I’m writing every week is interesting to my readers like you or not!
great read, the graphs look beautiful!