The Games are gonna be cool for the residents who are into that kind of thing, right? And, if all goes well, lots of locals are expecting a financial windfall, right? We’d like to point out a gigantic problem here and now. We’ve been concerned that local businesses might get a little, shall we say, greedy; and that we wouldn’t be surprised to see $18 hotdogs being sold on Main Street. It doesn’t take an idiot to say that the real money to be made is long-term. $18 hotdogs might pay your rent for a few months, but think about how pissed off the visitors will be. They’ll never come back and they’ll tell all their friends that we are in fact criminals, we all have six wives and that you can’t get a drink here. If we can keep the price of a lousy hotdog under $5 (or normal get-fucked-Mr.-Tourist-prices), we’ll get people to come back year after year after year. By the year 2010, when we become the skiing epicenter of the western world, then we can charge $18 for hotdogs. Use your heads people.
The Salt Lake Tribune’s Rolly and Wells ran a little blurb on Wild Utah having to change its name. You may have even seen the threatening letter we ran on the front page of the last issue telling us to change our name, or ‘there’s gonna be trouble.’ Trust us when we say, our legal team swashbuckled that shit without breaking a sweat. We hate to sound cocky, but we’re publishers: we know what we can and cannot print. Anyone else think they got some game?
Michael Lund was the 1974 world champion of ballet freestyle skiing. In 1978, Lund was allegedly wrapped up in a marijuana bust off the Oregon coast. 37 tons of dope sat on a freighter, while (as the story goes) Lund made plans to bring it into his house by way of a tugboat and barge purchased with cash, and his 61-foot racing sloop. When the DEA seized the freighter, Lund disappeared. 23 years later, Lance McCain was arrested in Colorado for avoiding child support. Guess whose finger prints came up? Lund pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute. OK, but where’d the dope go?
Picabo Street, as naughty skiers go, was kicked off Copper Mountain, Colorado November 3rd for—hold on to you butt here folks—skiing too fast. Did anyone see this coming? Sure, she’s a little rough around the edges, but Street’s got two Olympic medals. And what did she get those medals for? The ski patroller who pulled her over didn’t even know who she was. Duh.
Will the real Legacy please step forward. That word gets tossed around like a wiener in a BYU dormroom. The real Legacy in Utah is that some day, shine on you crazy diamond, all seven of the local ski resorts can be skied on one ticket. This year, Solitude and Brighton can be had with the “Solbright” ticket; Alta and Snowbird lock wings with the Alta-Snowbird ticket; and as politics will be the toughest chew of the meal, Deer Valley and Park City are, well, doing sort of the same thing. How so? Well, between January 10th and March 1st of this year, you can cross the sacred boundary between DV and PC. All you need is 19 friends, each with a lift ticket, about $2200 for four all-day, private ski instructors, and $1000 worth of “Ski Interconnect tickets.” If you typically like to poach the DV-PC boundary, stay on the ball. This year the resorts will have a checkpoint guard.