It’s that time of year again. The town is ours for a while. The fall colors are coming on, nights are cool, and the days are comfortable after what has been a pretty hot summer. Ski season will be on us before long, and while I’m never quite ready to let go of fall, the anticipation of ski season spices things up. I went through the annual anguish over what passes to buy. For years, I’ve had passes for both Deer Valley and Park City Mountain. It’s indulgent, but my heirs will just squander it, so I might as well beat them to it. But I find I use the Park City pass less and less, and every year, wonder if it’s really worth it. The extra two weeks on machine-made snow in November hardly justifies the expense, and the closing dates are the same now, so it’s not like it buys much additional skiing. But it does buy Jupiter Bowl, and that’s reason enough. So I got both again. The anticipation of being on the mountain is tempered by the dread of getting there. Traffic gets worse and worse every year. The city is going to study traffic on 248 yet again. Spoiler alert: There are too many cars and we need to stop building more stuff. Quinns Junction is already a mess, and we are now going to add a Maverik gas station into the mix just to further confuse things.  There is, of course, the bus from Richardson Flat. It drops me right at the front steps of the resorts, and mostly works. It’s an annoying concession to growth I wish hadn’t happened, and feels like a major Covid/flu vector when it’s packed. It’s also a big deterrent to skiing Park City Mountain. Between reservations, expensive paid parking, and the bus from Siberia, it’s really easy to choose Deer Valley. But getting to Snow Park isn’t necessarily easy anymore, and parking seems to fill earlier and earlier. I used to park at Jordanelle and ride the gondola, but parking there has become unpredictable, and sometimes there is a long line of people shuttled from hotels in Heber.So I’ve been eagerly watching the progress on the new lifts from the Mayflower side.  Driving into town, I can look across the reservoir and see that the foundations for the towers are in. Friends have hiked the area and say that the terminal foundations are also in, just waiting for the towers to be installed. Time is running short, and while the process is pretty quick once the towers are set, there is still stringing the cables, building the terminals, and load testing the whole operation. The schedule on that is not being advertised. Initially, the reports were that they would have the lift connecting to the Sultan nose in for this season, but I’m not seeing anything recently that confirms that.The Grand Hyatt Hotel is opening in November, and I looked at their website. They are taking reservations starting Nov. 20. That’s before Deer Valley is open, and the pre-season rates are about $350/night, plus a $40 “resort fee” and taxes, or around $425 all in. That seems like a lot for a room in an active construction zone. The amount of dirt flying out there is stunning, and for now, the “view” out the hotel window is wanting.  The rates bump up to around $800 once Deer Valley is open, and then $1,300/night by Christmas. Those are ski-in/ski-out prices.The hotel website doesn’t say anything about ski access, other than mentioning that Deer Valley Resort is two miles away. That sounds like they will shuttle people to the Jordanelle Gondola for the time being. But a guy can dream, and there will be a 500-car day skier parking lot there, and presumably some way to get from there to the base of the new lift that won’t involve climbing through open utility trenches.  There are new runs that will deliver you back to the East Village/Mayflower base, and I can see trenches for snow-making pipes. So it could happen if everything aligns just right, and could get knocked off schedule by any of the million moving parts that make construction on that scale so difficult. So far, nobody’s making any promises on schedules, and there’s a lot to do in a pretty short time. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but soak in the fall colors and enjoy the calm before the storm.I’m looking for hornet nests, my preferred winter forecasting tool, and so far, not really seeing many. Still too early for that. Various predictions are already out from the Farmers Almanac and some more scientific operations. They seem to think it will be warm and wet, all based on the La Nina pattern in the Pacific. I can live with that, as long as it’s not rain.Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.The post More Dogs on Main: Gearing up for ski season appeared first on Park Record.