What is a ski patroller?

Ski patrollers are first responders on the mountain. Our job is to assess injuries and transport injured people off the hill to either our clinic at the bottom or to send them out to a hospital in Park City or Salt Lake.

Another aspect of our job is setting up the mountain. We’ll mark trails with rope lines and bamboo. We’ll put signs around the place to mark a boundary.

We also do avalanche mitigation. We’ll use explosives to mitigate slopes as well as ski compaction and ski cutting. We’ll go into these slide paths and try and trigger them sometimes.

Could you say more about the explosives?

We use cast boosters. It’s a type of high explosive. Usually we’re deploying those by hand, or we have devices set up in trees called trams. Think of a zipline for an explosive so we can get an explosive out onto the slope without us actually having to go out onto the slope ourselves.

We also have two Avalauncher gun towers. Think of a really souped-up T-shirt cannon. It uses compressed nitrogen to shoot an explosive projectile. We’ll do that in areas where there’s avalanche terrain above roadways or ski runs we want to mitigate.

How did you become a patroller?

I moved to Utah full-time in 2015. I just wanted to try out a winter out west and more or less never left. I started out as a ski instructor, but I burned out of that job pretty quickly. I wanted to get a job that had a little bit more freedom to ski around. I would see patrollers skiing around and getting to ski powder and doing what looked like, at the time, a really cool, fun job.

I had a Wilderness First Responder certification, and I decided to apply for the patrol, and I got hired. My first winter on the patrol was 2017, and it is my eighth season now. Since then, I have learned that it isn’t quite the glamorous job I saw when I was ski instructing. There are fun aspects to it, but it is a really serious job.

I’ve been doing it for eight years. I still love it. It’s a job that I’m extremely passionate about.

Why were you on strike, and what did you win?

We started bargaining in March. Our contract expired at the end of April. We were hoping to reach a tentative agreement before the season started, and we weren’t getting any traction in what we thought were the important articles, which are wages, benefits, and education.

Leading up to the strike we had a bunch of collective actions. One was all of us wearing our union T-shirts to our general meeting, which is the first time all of us patrollers meet together with management at the beginning of the season. We did that to show our solidarity, that we did have unity. It didn’t seem like that really moved the needle like we had hoped.

We also staged several practice pickets where we showed the company that, again, we have patrollers on their days off, willing to stand shoulder to shoulder to tell the company that we’re unified in what we want.

Early in December, we decided to open a strike authorization vote, which we unanimously passed. That still didn’t move the needle in the direction we had hoped. Along with a few unfair labor practice charges filed against the company, we decided to go on strike and to withhold our labor.

We for sure would rather have bargained well with the company and gotten a good contract without having to go on strike. That’s not the case; that’s not what happened. Ultimately, we went on strike, and that’s how we won the contract we deserved.

The basic highlights are: Rookie base wage went up on average a little over $2. On a whole, for the entire unit on average wages, went up $4. The best part of the contract is this idea of wage decompression. Before this contract, you would plateau at about your fourth year ski patrolling. We secured, on average, a $7 wage increase for our snow safety specialists, which are some of our most tenured patrollers. They’re the ones that decide when we need to go and do avalanche mitigation work.

We also secured patrol exchange, where a patroller can go to a different western ski resort and patrol there for a week while their patroller patrols with us. They get to actually learn how to patrol on a different mountain and possibly learn new ways to do certain tasks.

Could you say more about your wages before and after the new contract, especially compared to cost of living?

The cost of living in Park City is no joke. It is way beyond the average in the rest of the United States. After the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a huge housing boom where all these wealthy people from out of state are buying up real estate. It causes huge inflation in the housing market.

My rookie year ski patrolling in 2017, I made $11.50 an hour. Now in my eighth season, with the new contract, I’m up to $34 an hour.

Before this contract, that would have been $27 an hour?

Correct.

Living on $27 an hour in Park City, what’s that like?

I live in Salt Lake. I cannot afford to live in Park City, period. Most people who work in Park City commute. Not very many people actually live and work in Park City. It’s mostly unattainable for working-class people.

You mentioned collective actions in advance of the strike. Utah is a right-to-work state. How did you get such high levels of participation?

A lot of organizing and a lot of one-on-one conversations with our unit members.

We built a mobilization committee where every single member in our unit — about 204, which includes ski patrollers and mountain safety — had a representative. I believe this committee was about thirty-five or so people. We used this mobilization committee to have conversations with our unit and to find out what’s agitating our unit as a whole.

We’re having these phone calls almost weekly, months out leading up to this strike. A lot of the collective actions we did in the lead-up to the strike were really to test our mobilization and just see what we could accomplish.

The whole time we’re collecting data to see who’s participating and figuring out who we need to talk to, because we truly would not have been successful without every single person pitching in.

During the strike, videos of the disruption went viral — long and chaotic lift lines, guests walking up the mountain. How quickly did the strike cause this disruption?

It happened right away. I think like twenty percent of terrain was open, which is way less than if we were up on the hill.

Park City Mountain was operating with about thirty to thirty-five ski patrol managers brought in from other Vail resorts, as well as local managers. They don’t normally do our job. From what I’ve heard, they were totally overwhelmed by the volume of people and the limited terrain. Whereas on a normal day, we could have upward of one hundred patrollers working on the mountain.

It seemed like response times for injured guests were pretty delayed. There was delayed response and too many guests to not a lot of patrollers. The ratio was way off. I can only imagine if I was on vacation in Park City — probably a pretty lousy experience.

People were almost unanimously angry at Vail and were supporting what we were doing. We had so much local Park City community support. People would constantly drop us off pizzas, donuts, coffee, food — you name it. And then, obviously, we had a GoFundMe strike fund that hit $300,000 in community donations, and we were able to use that money to pay picketing patrollers while we were on strike.

Could you tell us more about the history of your union?

The Canyons Professional Ski Patrol Association has existed since the early 2000s. In a lot of ways, myself and the rest of our board are standing on the shoulders of all these organizers that came before us, all the way from the early 2000s till now.

In 2015, Vail acquired Park City and merged the two resorts, effectively doubling the size of our bargaining unit. Legally, we had to recertify with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). During that process, Vail launched a massive union-busting campaign that was nearly successful. The union won 51 percent to 49 percent.

From 2015 until now, we have been slowly gaining solidarity. It’s taken several contracts, several different leadership groups, to get to where we are, and each small win stacked up until we ended up ratifying a contract with a unanimous vote, which I believe is the tip of the mountain in terms of solidarity in our unit. We unanimously voted to go on strike, we went on strike, and then we unanimously ratified a contract.

In terms of an accomplishment, ratifying the contract with a 100 percent ratification vote almost trumps the actual contents of the contract in a way. We were able to create unity and solidarity, and then keep it throughout the process.

In a right-to-work state, how did you get from 51 percent to 100 percent?

It’s a lot of phone calls, a lot of Zoom calls. It is the one-on-one conversations. A handful of us board members and stewards actually attended a training that our union siblings in CWA 7765 — the campus and health care workers locally here at the University of Utah — helped us learn about. This training, “Organizing for Power,” was created by Jane McAlevey. I would recommend everyone read her book, No Shortcuts.

Having that Organizing for Power training under my belt and creating this mobilization committee to have these one-on-one conversations is what did it.

Could you say a bit more about the impact of Vail purchasing Canyons and Park City?

I think it’s important to look at the ski industry as a whole. There are two major companies that own the vast majority of ski mountains, basically globally at this point. They sell a product, an all-inclusive pass to all of their resorts, in the spring and summer months, and then they inflate the price of a day ticket.

Park City seems to get more crowded every single season. People aren’t buying day tickets anymore because they’re unaffordable, so they’re buying these megapasses and planning these vacations without any idea how much snow or how much terrain is going to be open. It takes away from the experience I knew growing up, where you could afford a day ticket for your family and could go skiing at a nice little area that wasn’t all built up. It’s certainly changed. It’s more of a resort experience now.

Since 2020, the number of units represented by United Mountain Workers has tripled. Just days after Park City patrollers returned to work, patrollers at Arapahoe Basin voted to join your union. What’s behind the current explosion of organizing in the ski industry?

I think it just goes to show that the economy in the United States doesn’t really feel like it supports working-class people, and the wages at a lot of these ski resorts are pretty low. We work jobs that I feel are thought of as fun. In reality, it’s a ton of work, and it’s absolutely essential for any sort of operation to function. So why are we, the essential workers, being squeezed in a town and an economy that we can’t even afford to live in and not making a livable wage, while shareholders are getting big dividends and Vail is doing these massive stock buybacks? I think a lot of that behavior is driving the unionization effort right now.

Historically, CWA 7781 was the United Professional Ski Patrollers of America. That name served our group really well for a while, but it became apparent that we needed a rebrand to be more inclusive to the mountain worker community, so that’s where we got to United Mountain Workers. We have two units that are lift maintenance. We want the door to be open for a potential ski resort that could be wall-to-wall United Mountain Workers. There’s an ongoing organizing effort to get more of these units included.

What’s next for Park City ski patrol and United Mountain Workers?

More organizing. We have our contract; we’ll have it until 2027, and until then, personally I hope to keep doing organizing work. I hope to start organizing at the local political level because obviously the politics in Utah are not great and are not great in a lot of states regarding labor and unions. We need to keep getting these wins, not just for us as a unit, but because these wins have ripple effects across the whole labor community. I just hope people keep organizing and keep sticking together and realizing we all have a lot more in common together than we do with folks all the way up at the top.