Industry News
In an Instagram post yesterday Ski Utah threw their support behind the gondola as the solution to Little Cottonwood Canyon’s traffic woes. The public comment period ends this Friday, September 3rd.
Little Cottonwood Canyon Transportation Solution
We strongly urge you to submit your comment regarding alternative transportation solutions in Little Cottonwood canyon via the link in our bio.
Ski Utah strongly supports the gondola with the La Caille base station. The future of recreating in Little Cottonwood Canyon is in your hands! Visit @gondolaworksut for more information.
UDOT has spent more than three years trying to solve the traffic problems in Little Cottonwood Canyon, UT, narrowing down all the alternatives from an initial 124 to 5, and now to their final two preferred alternatives. On Friday 25th June 2021, they opened a 45-day public comment period, which was later extended. They also released the draft Environmental Impact Survey.
- Related: Utah Department of Transportation Offers 2 New Ways to Mitigate Traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon
One of the two preferred alternatives is a gondola, from La Caille through Little Cottonwood Canyon to Snowbird and Alta. The video above depicts what that might look like:
Want to know what having a gondola in Little Cottonwood Canyon will be like? This video lets you experience the actual system proposed.
Beginning at the base station proposed at La Caille, the video shows the journey from the hub where gondola riders start to the top of the canyon. A gondola system would offer a never-before-experienced vantage point of the beauty of the canyon, while also preserving it for future generations.
Gondolas provide a long-term solution to challenges that have plagued the Cottonwood Canyons for decades. SR-210 – which is the only road in and out of Little Cottonwood Canyon – is the most avalanche prone highway in North America and welcomes over a million visitors year-round.
Gondolas provide secondary emergency access when that road is blocked by avalanche debris or stuck buses and cars in bad weather.
The main purpose of the project is to significantly improve the safety, mobility, and reliability of transportation to Snowbird and Alta, up US Highway 210, Little Cottonwood Canyon.
Of the five shortlisted alternatives, two really stood out above the rest. They are:
- The Enhanced Bus Service in Peak-Period Shoulder Lane, with a rider time of 36 minutes.
- Gondola B, with a base station at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon near La Caille.
For those concerned about the comparative costs of each project, the gondola would cost more initially but would cost less than the bus service to operate. Thus, over the course of thirty years, both options would cost taxpayers the same amount.
The comment period started Friday and two public hearings are planned for July. UDOT hopes to have a final decision sometime during next winter.
In 2020, the Utah Department of Transportation announced three possible strategies to help reduce traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon (U.S. Highway 210): a cog railway or a gondola to shuttle visitors to ski resorts Alta and Snowbird, or a new and improved bus system to shuttle more skiers up the canyon.
And out of the three proposed options, the gondola appeals the most to Utah’s governor Spencer Cox. Deseret News reports that Cox said it would be “cheaper than the train solution, but more expensive than the bus solution.” He also said it would be more “weather immune” because heavy snowfall, as well as avalanches and avalanche control, all increase traffic in the canyon, often causing painfully long lines of skiers waiting in their cars on the gridlocked highway.
“Just the ability to move people at such a high rate of speed and get people up and down very quickly—it’s much more efficient than the bus system would be,” Cox said to an interviewer with Deseret News. “And it also has the support of the partners and the ski resorts. There’s a willingness there for them to participate on the private side to reduce the cost to taxpayers, so there’s an opportunity to bring those costs down as they pay for some of that as well.”
Gov. Cox also thinks a gondola would benefit canyon recreation in the summer along with the winter because it could become a “tourist attraction in and of itself.” Apparently, he is leaning in the direction of a canyon gondola at this time but is still a ways away from making a final—very expensive—decision.
Although Cox favors improving transportation up the canyon with the gondola, not everyone is so convinced that any of the three proposals have the canyon’s best interest in mind. According to the Deseret News, all options were immediately denounced by conservation organizations and backcountry enthusiasts who say “they are an attempt to turn the canyon into an amusement park.”
The Wasatch Backcountry Alliance—a recognized voice for the backcountry community involved in human-powered winter recreation in the Central Wasatch Mountains—wrote the following in a Facebook post concerning the Utah Department of Transportation’s 2020 announcement to improve canyon travel:
“The Wasatch Backcountry Alliance is concerned the shiny appeal of an expensive train or gondola system may distract us from our goals or actually make things worse,” Brad Rutledge said, co-founder of the organization and current board member. “These solutions not only miss the target on making things better, but the train and gondola concepts threaten many of the things that make the Wasatch Mountains so amazing today.”
The three options proposed by state officials come as a result of more than 6,500 public comments and will be included as alternatives as part of the Little Cottonwood Canyon draft environmental impact statement, according to Deseret News.
If Gov. Cox approves the gondola, it would have a base station in Sandy, where visitors would park in a proposed 1,500-space structure on the west side of North Little Cottonwood Road at La Caille. Then, the gondola would allow direct transportation eight miles up the canyon to Alta and Snowbird and take an estimated 30-40 minutes to get there.
But if legislators decided to go with the cog rail, it would start from the same Sandy base station as the proposed gondola and parking structure. It would include a diesel-powered train with a cogwheel on a track underneath, giving direct service to Alta and Snowbird.
And if they decided on buses, there would then be 24 buses going up to the resort at six buses per hour.
All options raise environmental concerns for the canyon’s watershed. Canyon enthusiasts such as the Wasatch Backcountry Alliance and Save Our Canyons say that these options will bring too many visitors to the already popular Little Cottonwood Canyon and ruin it. Gov. Cox, on the other hand, believes it would help drive tourism and economic gain for the state of Utah.
Breaking: Ski industry supports government money going directly into its pockets. The gondola is an absurd idea that does nothing for the enormous number users that don’t recreate at Alta or Snowbird. This is a marketing idea fed directly from the ski resorts to UDOT. It’s completely corrupt.
We should be focusing on transport solutions like bussing that would would be useful in all the recreational zones in all seasons.
This plan comes with enormous costs to the view shed and to many recreational sites for climbs, hikes and runners. Cable cars and towers are all anyone will see in the canyon if this happens.
People want other people to take public transportation so that they can still drive their car
The gondola system only facilitates travel to the resorts and will primarily be used in the winter while damaging a lot of recreation for the rest of the year
It is not a scalable system in terms of usability and will cost a fortune to operate when not in use most of the year
The bus system without the road expansion is far superior and cost optimized
We need tolls and other ways to implement that encourage people to stop taking their cars up the canyon
pretty clear that “anonymous” is part of the apocalyptic death cult. I’m sure you are invited to all the parties. Listen to your own advice and get off the computer and find something that doesn’t make you such a curmudgeon. Constantly calling everyone an idiot just screams that you need therapy. Go find a real person to talk to rather than vent on the internet.
There’s like 11 ppl posting as anonymous.
How do you know this? Don’t post sh!t that you have NO idea of the true story. Anonymous could be using a spoof IP address 11 times. This is the problem in society currently. Everyone knows more than the next guy or acts like it. Stop spreading lies
Educate yourself and learn about how the web has created a SUPERPOWER that’s controlling our minds. Step away from your keyboard and open a book. It’s all in there, knowledge is POWER.
In the eyes of “Ski Utah” it is imperitive to get more people to all Utah resorts as the resorts are a huge revenue stream for the state. They are boosters above all else. Who wouldn’t want to take a carnival ride to Snowbird? It’ll be great.
You will perhaps remember that the Outdoor Retailers Convention formerly held twice a year in Salt Lake City said adios Utah because of the lack of an environmental ethic in the development crazed state. But that is another matter.
It is critical to maximize the number of people in the canyon so that the powder can all be trampled by 10am and the people lining up for lifts at 7am can get one good run before its gone.
Lift lines in Utah must be made longer. That’s where the money is. Who cares about a protected watershed when there is ample Diet Coke..
Of course they do, it’s like handing tax payer money directly to Alta and Snowbird
Pretty ignorant statement. You could say the same thing about freeway system or USFS. Both allow these resorts to exist.
In general the role of government is to provide the infrastructure, security and fair playing field to allow business and employees to thrive. I know those principals have fallen away in modern socialist times, but that was the founding purpose of our government.
Let’s spend another 3-5 years pandering to all the stake holders. I wonder what the traffic is going to look like at that time. I wonder what the delays are going to do to the overall cost of the project. 10 years to figure out a solution to a traffic problem… That’s pretty impressive America.
We built the majority of the interstate highway system in this country in 10 years. It now takes 10 years to approve a gondola.