I'm not a fan, and not just for the "how dare you ruin my view". If the idea was to mitigate avalanche closures, they should have built snow sheds on 210. This is not going to solve weather issues - chairlifts and gondolas and things of that sort can't run in high winds, which are fairly common in the mountains and often come along with the storms that tend to cause the biggest avalanche issues on 210. Given how often the ski resorts up there have wind holds on their existing lifts, this is a very real issue that gondola proponents seem to have conveniently ignored.
This also gives no thought to all the people that go up this canyon to do something other than ski at Snowbird or Alta. Plenty of people snowshoe or backcountry ski or whatever in the lower and middle canyon. Buses could at least stop at the big trailheads whereas a gondola obviously can't. And whatever restrictions/tolls get put on 210 to incentivize people to use the gondola are going to apply to everyone. I see it as a scheme to convert those people currently using our public lands for free into paying customers at private ski resorts.
And even at maximum capacity, the gondola can only carry 35 people up every 2 minutes. For something that's going to cost over a half billion dollars, I expect better.
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Topic: Tolls proposed for Cottonwood Canyons (Read 13130 times)