After last season’s ski season was cut short by Covid, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort reopened again cautiously later in the year. Like many other ski resorts, Jackson Hole now caps daily lift-ticket sales to prevent crowding, limits chair lift capacity and dining capacity by 75% per local health department rules.Wednesday at noon, I stood in the middle of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, peering over my skis at the run below us.
Though my boyfriend, Andrew, and I, both zealous skiers, live just a few miles from Jackson Hole, with the Covid-19 pandemic still raging, we’d avoided the major commercial ski areas this winter in favor of theand Nordic skiing. But we were curious to see how the big ski resorts were managing the crowds a few months in and how the crowds were managing all the new Covid precautions.
Next up was a five-minute bus ride in a shuttle designed to accommodate 45 people but limited to a maximum of 25. Plastered everywhere inside were signs requiring skiers to wear masks and our fellow passengers respected the dictate, save one man who stonily ignored a request from another skier to pull up his mask.
At the ticket office, we quickly picked up the prepaid passes we’d ordered online. But our hearts sank at the sight of the lift lines. The wait for the tram, limited to 25 riders instead of the normal 100, easily looked like a two-hour ordeal. We bypassed that crowd and trudged up a slight hill, bombarded by more signs and banners laying out resort-wide Covid rules and mask-required areas.
The line at the next lift looked worryingly sardine can-like, but as we got closer, we saw that its snaking nature had made the widely spaced skiers appear more congested than they were. In the end, we only waited 15 minutes. Still, to minimize the time languishing on long lift-lines at the base, we headed to the upper mountain lifts, which had much shorter waits. To avoid dining indoors, we had picked up burritos from D.O.G. in town and tucked them into our pockets for lunch on the lift.
the most crowded year weve seen ever. stay home. stay away.
Ski resorts are not managing the pandemic at all. Stay away from ski towns
Jai Mahadev 🙏❤️ jai bhole ki Nagri 🌅 1625