During peak ski season, with lift lines stretching hundreds of people deep, Park City Mountain Resort ski patrollers announced the first strike of its kind in modern memory on Dec. 27, 2024. The skiing public rallied in support for mountain workers, chanting in lift lines, “Vail, pay your workers,” even as the strike added complications to their ski vacations. The strike stretched for 12 days until Vail Resorts, which owns Park City Mountain, came to a deal with the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association.
With the strike, Park City patrollers negotiated a raise for their safety specialists, “the people that we rely on to perform safe avalanche control and get the mountain open safely,” says Allison Bagley, the president of Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association. They had found their members would see pay raises in their first few years on the job, but increases petered out over time, compressing their wages and leaving no incentive for veteran patrollers to stick around. The expertise possessed by those tenured patrollers is vital on the mountain. “We need people who have the institutional knowledge to open and run everything safely. That’s something the company can’t provide for us,” says Bagley. “That comes only from people who have been working there year after year and see the snow, see the snowpack and have all that knowledge.”
In addition to highly specialized, the day-to-day work of ski patrollers is strenuous and dangerous, “whether that be responding to a critical patient who’s injured on the mountain, or throwing explosives above the tree line in a storm at avalanches,” says
Ryan Dineen, a labor organizer with United Mountain Workers, which represents ski industry union workers across the Mountain West, including Park City and Breckenridge, where Dineen is a ski patroller. At Park City and Canyons, at any given time, there could be as many as 10,000 people on the mountain—people that ski patrollers are responsible for. “We’re running calls throughout the day, and there’s also always projects to be done and other work to maintain all of the terrain,” says Bagley.
What’s New for Park City Ski Patrol This Season?
Now that the 2025-2026 ski season is upon us, the scenery looks a little different from last year. “We have a lot of changes in our contract that we’re going to implement,” says Bagley. “I’m really hopeful that things will be changing for the better, and it’ll open up a lot of opportunities for everyone.” For Vail’s part, after stock prices took a dive during the strike and some Park City skiers filed a class-action lawsuit for not informing resort-goers of the hobbled operations, the company appointed a new CEO in May of this year. The board ousted Kirsten Lynch after three years on the job and brought back former CEO Rob Katz.
Park City ski patrollers’ win has been felt by union workers throughout other industries as well, which Dineen witnessed while attending the annual convention for Communications Workers of America. “We’re carrying ourselves a little bit differently,” says Dineen. “There’s a bravado in the room, almost. We’re learning that our value is only going to be acknowledged if we do it ourselves first.”
In August, Park City Mountain’s bike patrol workers petitioned to unionize. They will join their ski patroller counterparts after their vote on Aug. 28. Park City’s lift maintenance union also reached its second two-year agreement with Vail in August. Solitude’s ski patrollers unionized and struck a deal with their employers in July of this year, securing a 10% increase to their base pay.
“Organizing workforces is the most powerful way to make your voice heard,” says Bagley, who believes they never would have secured the same gains in pay and benefits without unionizing. “Without those protections under labor law, the company could have retaliated against us, and we wouldn’t have been safe to show our solidarity or speak up for issues that we were seeing in our workplace.”
Dineen points to Starbucks and Amazon as two “shining examples” of retaliation against workers who have tried to unionize. It’s a legal right that grows more difficult to exercise with the issuance of anti-union executive orders on a federal level and the passage of laws like the embattled H.B. 267 in Utah.
As a larger labor movement fights to gain momentum around the country, it seems ski patrollers have had particular success. Dineen notes that ski patrollers have a possible advantage.
“We have this kind of inherent trust in each other. We forge our relationships in a crucible of intense experiences,” he says, observing that an Amazon warehouse worker might not have the chance to even get to know the other people on the floor. “So we already have the muscles of solidarity.”
There are some takeaways for workers across other industries, however. “There’s a thing called ‘a vending machine union,’ where people pay their dues and aren’t very involved,” explains Bagley. “It’s your union and you’re fighting for your livelihood as well as your co-workers’. Make sure you’re educating yourself and participating as much as you can, because whatever you put in is what you get out of it.”
“That’s why I love working at Park City and being part of the union. Everyone loves their job and cares about each other so much, and that’s how we have power in our union,” she says.
Still, unfair labor practices cannot be overcome in solidarity alone.
“The community was extremely supportive of us, which was the only way we were able to pull any of this off,” says Bagley. While the ski patrollers picketed outside of Park City Mountain Resort for nearly two weeks, community supporters kept them fed every day. Before the strike, the union strike fund had raised around $30,000 to sustain patrollers while they withheld their work so they could still pay bills and support their families. By the end, the fund had raised over $300,000. “Every single person on that picket line was able to be paid their normal wages during that strike,” says Bagley.
Bagley hopes the community will continue to show up for other unions fighting for fair working conditions, as well. “We were able to ratify our contract, but there’s always still more to accomplish and we’re always still fighting.“
And, if you have the chance, it doesn’t hurt to tip your hat to mountain workers. “When you ski by the person bumping chairs, say ‘good morning,’ say ‘hi,’ say ‘thanks,’ say ‘have a great day,’” says Dineen. “If you see one of us out there, let’s have a conversation. Just that support and acknowledgment goes really far for us and it fuels our day-to-day.”
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