Two Arapahoe Basin Skiers Debate the New Paid Parking System

On Friday, March 22, skiers in Colorado were greeted by eye-popping news. Arapahoe Basin, a ski area that has long cultivated an anti-corporate and renegade reputation, has enacted a paid parking reservation system for the 2024-25 season. Visitors driving to the mountain on peak days next year will need to pay $20 and reserve a parking spot prior to arrival, while some customers will be able to buy a season-long parking pass for $150. Carpools with four or more visitors can reserve a spot for free.

The news came just weeks after international ski resort conglomerate Alterra Mountain Company (of Ikon Pass fame) announced plans to acquire A-Basin. 

The news, which was announced on Instagram, did not go over well. Within two days, the post had generated nearly 500 comments—almost all of them negative. Longtime A-Basin skiers Adam Roy,editor-in-chief of Backpacker, and Fred Dreier, articles editor at Outside, discuss this brewing kerfuffle.

Fred Dreier: OK Adam, I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you’ve been magically transformed into A-Basin’s social media manager. On most days, your job entails uploading photos of skiers hucking off the cliffs below Pallavacini or weaving through the rocks on the East Wall. Your online commenters love you, because A-Basin skiers have a preternatural affection for their resort and its punk rock vibes.

Now, imagine one day your manager emails you the following copy and tells you to punch it into Instagram: For the 2024-25 season, we will require parking reservations for weekends and holidays from mid-December through early May. On those days, each vehicle arriving before 1 P.M. will need a reservation, which must be made online in advance. Daily general parking reservations will be available for $20 per vehicle. 

Do you flee? Roll over and play dead? Pop a Xanax? Or just, like, strap on some body armor and prepare for the coming comments-section onslaught?

Adam Roy: I’d call in sick and let my boss deal with it. The part you left off is that they made this announcement the same day that passes for the 2024-25 season went on sale—no warning, no advance notice, just, “Time to buy your passes and also here’s this massive increase in fees we didn’t tell you about in advance!” That’s a pretty terrible position to be in as a social media manager, but to be fair it’s also a pretty rough position to be in as an A-Basin skier. If you want a pass you’ve got to decide in the next few months before they raise the price, but it sounds like they’re not going to reveal some really key details about this plan until the fall. How many parking passes is a ‘limited number’? Are they ‘limited’ the way season passes are limited, where you’ll get one as long as you don’t sleep on it, or ‘limited’ like Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets were limited?

FD: These are good questions. I actually called up A-Basin’s general manager, Al Henceroth, and he told me that obtaining one of the $150 season passes is likely to be less difficult to get that Taylor Swift tickets, but also something you won’t want to sleep on. “People will need to pay attention when they go on sale,” is what he said.

Henceroth told me that A-Basin staffers anticipated blowback, but I’m not sure they anticipated backlash like this. After three days there are about more than 5 times their average number of comments, and boy oh boy is there a lot of rage. Which ones most adequately capture your feelings?

AR: I’m torn between tim.saladpony’s “Reservations are annoying but understandable given the parking challenges at A Basin. But the $20 charge is insulting and feels like a money grab,” and kykwyzer’s “You have to pay $20 for parking…ok Vail.”

FD: According to Henceroth, A-Basin did this to cut down on traffic jams. He said that the lots fill up almost every Saturday and Sunday, and the resort has had to turn people away on eight separate occasions this year.

Still, I think it’s worth unpacking the emotional response that A-Basin skiers like you have toward this. Adam, you’re a current A-Basin pass holder. Why did this news make you want to rip your hair out and scream into the void?

AR:  It feels like a kick in the gut to the exact kind of skier they’ve built their reputation off, Front Range skiers in particular. If you’re a New Yorker or a Chicagoan coming into town for a weeklong ski vacation, it’s a relatively reasonable expense to eat on top of your airfare, lodging, and lift tickets; you drop $40 on parking for the weekend and the other five weekdays you ski, you park for free. But if you’re a skier in the Denver metro area or I-70 corridor with a 9-to-5 job who skis every weekend, that adds up really fast.

FD: Henceroth says the ultimate goal is to convince more people to carpool. Do you think this will do that?

AR: I appreciate that they make an exception for carpools of four or more people, but that’s a wildly high bar, both in terms of being able to find a consistent group and having a car that will fit all of them and their gear. And getting there without driving is harder still: Your only choice is the Snowstang, a $25-a-pop, once-a-day bus that only picks up in two spots. The ski industry as a whole puts tourists with money over local skiers. For a while, A-Basin was the exception, and they got a lot of great press and goodwill from it, and now it feels like they’ve decided to cash it in at skiers’ expense.

FD: Yeah, I can totally see how a $20 surcharge for every ski session throws a pretty big financial monkey wrench into your plans. Let’s say you ski every Saturday from December through March. That’s $320. I’m sorry, amigo. I’m going to pour one out for your checking account.

What made me personally want to eat broken glass was that this parking pass comes after A-Basin has maintained the renegade image for decades. I grew up in Colorado and lionized the place because of the vibes. The resort famously bailed out of the Epic Pass in 2019, saying it was putting customers first. The general sentiment was that A-Basin puts its skiers ahead of corporate greed, as was illustrated in this big 5280 feature story that called it the “anti-resort.” This parking pass feels like A-Basin has crossed some imaginary line in the sand separating mega resorts from local ski areas. Paid parking is ubiquitous at Vail, Aspen, and Breckenridge, while small ski areas like Loveland or Granby Ranch let you park for free.

So Adam, does A-Basin’s argument that parking reservations will cut down on traffic jams convince you?

AR: Not really. They’re not wrong that parking there is chaotic—I’ve shown up around when the lifts opened and ended up barely getting a spot—and I sympathize with the desire to make sure that people aren’t driving all the way there and then turning around because they couldn’t park. I get that not everyone wants to wake up at 5:30 A.M. to go skiing like I do, and if they think reserved parking is the way to make people’s visits better, so be it. But if that were the main goal, there are other ways to set up a parking reservation system without wringing $20 a pop out of skiers.

FD: Henceroth says the $20 fee will prevent no-shows.

AR: Yeah, well, there are ways to accomplish that without charging passholders hundreds of dollars extra on top of their pass. They could have gone the way national parks have and charged a lower price for reservations, $5 or so, which is enough to prevent people from booking a dozen reservations they probably won’t use but not so much that it’s a drain on regular skiers. They could have charged $20 to make the reservation and refunded most or all of it as long as you came, or even restricted your ability to make new reservations if you no-show, which is a strategy California’s state parks are experimenting with. They could have guaranteed passholders a chance to buy a parking pass when they renewed instead of kicking the can months down the line, or at least given them a certain amount of free parking reservations before they started charging.

FD: Here’s some back-of-the-napkin math. A-Basin has 1,750 parking spots, so that’s $35,000 in parking revenue each day. Henceroth estimated that the parking passes will be enforced on 50 days per season. That’s $1,750,000, not including fees from parking violations. Henceroth told me that this revenue will cover the cost of the infrastructure required to operate the parking permits.

I’m going to hold my nose, take a big gulp of Kool-Aide, and attempt to justify this parking pass to you. Here goes.

AR: Good luck, I’m not going to help you.

FD: Adam, the population of Colorado’s Front Range has exploded over the past decade. By my estimation, some eleventy zillion skiers now flock to the mountains every weekend. Arapahoe Basin, with its awesome terrain, is simply overwhelmed by them all. The lift lines are too big. The parking lot fills up too quickly. The ski area is a victim of its own success, and now management needs to step in and save its customers from themselves. Rather than enact a cap on ticket sales, management has wisely launched a parking reservation system, which will cap capacity and make a day at the slopes way chiller.

AR: I hear you, but overcrowding was a crisis-level problem with Epic Pass customers in the years leading up to 2019, and they never charged for parking then. Anyone who skis at A-Basin now would agree that the crowds are smaller now than back before 2019. Back then I’d bring an audiobook to listen to while I waited in line; I think I got through most of The Witcher series that way.

FD: Fair. OK, here’s my next stab at it. Ski areas are complex businesses with astronomical overhead costs, an embattled labor force, a finicky customer base, and seasonal revenue streams that are tied to the mysteries of Mother Nature. A few bad snow years and a kickass resort like A-Basin could crater. Survival amid these pressures requires businesses to constantly seek out new revenue sources. Arapahoe Basin is just following the financial playbook of other ski areas, and perhaps also the airline industry. Charge for parking. Charge to eat a bag of peanuts. Charge for oxygen.

AR: From what we know, this resort is not in dire financial straits. In fact, that same 5280 article noted that February and March 2022 were the two most profitable months in Arapahoe Basin’s history; that year, its profits were up 20 percent overall despite skier numbers being down 40 percent. So the “they’re charging for parking because ski resort employees have to eat too” argument doesn’t really convince me. And that’s not the rationale the resort is holding up.

And look, I’ll tell you something I’ve said before: I would pay more to ski at Arapahoe Basin. A season pass with no blackouts for a return customer costs just $559. For all that I’m complaining about them here, I’ve been a season pass holder for something like seven years while my friends were all skiing on their Ikon (base price $849) and Epic ($982) passes. My two most regular partners aren’t renewing their A-Basin passes, and I am because I just love the place that much. If they had added $150 to my pass price this year and told me that I had to reserve my parking in advance now, I wouldn’t have blinked. But the fact that I have to pay for an “unlimited” season pass, then hustle for a limited number of parking passes in a couple of months, then maybe open my wallet again every time I visit is so frustrating.

FD: Oh well, I tried. Before we bail, here’s my best pop-culture comparison: A-Basin charging for parking is like Kurt Cobain announcing a Nivana Christmas album.

AR: Finding out your Deadhead friend from college went into private equity.

FD: Martin Scorsese directing the latest Avengers sequel

AR: They’re going the way of Burning Man. Soon we’ll see Jeff Bezos on the slopes.

FD: So long as they don’t start charging for first chair, I’ll still love A-Basin.