The ski patrol strike served up an apparently eager scapegoat for ruined vacations over the holidays, though I do wonder how much the combination of almost no snow through Christmas Eve, followed by dump after dump in weather a little warm for snowmaking played a part in the mess.How much terrain, really, would have been open through the holidays without the ski patrollers picketing instead of working on the mountain? Neighboring Deer Valley Resort rocked along just fine by comparison with better than half its terrain available, even opening a couple of new lifts, while Park City Mountain ran crowded and crippled between 13% to a peak 30% open during the strike. They are different mountains, of course, with differences in terrain, and Deer Valley is about a third the size of Park City Mountain, America’s largest ski resort.Park City Mountain still had more trails open than any other ski mountain in Utah. No resorts in northern Utah were fully open in this period, though all were doing better than the Vail Resorts holding. The next worst was Solitude at around 30% open while Park City Mountain was in the low 20s.The Ice Castles in Midway didn’t open until Jan. 15 due to the early season weather being too warm. Likewise, the Utah Olympic Park delayed opening its inaugural uphill routes for similar reasons, along with too little snow soon followed by too much.Of course, Vail Resorts leaders can’t blame the weather for fumbling negotiations with the ski patrollers union enough to lead to the first strike in a generation and then bumbling through an agonizing dozen more days before giving the union the raises they sought in the first place. Ouch.On the PR front, glib professionals got schooled by plainspoken patrollers, and that wasn’t even close.Customer and community fury roared well past red hot during and at least in the immediate wake of the strike. Hindsight shows this all should have been avoided, and maybe there are some lessons here for the company leaders atop their Broomfield tower back in Colorado.Locally, all the enduring pent-up ire at the corporate entity erupted beyond the boundaries of a ski patrol strike. Residents’ personal claim on their home mountain already collides most during the holidays with the publicly traded company appealing to the full universe of ski vacationers.We also got a glimpse into how much local businesses rely symbiotically on the resorts, and their angst when something goes wrong.Only one of five homeowners in America’s friendliest ski town lives here full time, though. Second homes make up 70% of the total. Vacation rentals account for 41 percent of the residential properties in Park City. Full-time renters and places left dark between visits account for the rest where people don’t live in the home they own.These are just facts. But you can extrapolate from there, along with the other fact that 87% of the workforce commutes in from elsewhere.Whatever sway the community has, it’s concentrated in the municipal government — the council and various commissions. Call it rage, condensed, enduring after moments like this. The consequences of the strike in dollar terms alone cost more than giving the ski patrol the raises the union sought from the start. The possibly higher price would be the hits to Vail Resorts’ reputation as a brand, though I suspect we’re exaggerating that locally, maybe giving Park City more influence on this than it actually has.After all, this is just one of 41 such destinations for Vail Resorts, and one of 18 for Alterra Mountain Company, owner of Deer Valley Resort.Vail Resorts’ stock price, which has been sliding since 2022, climbed slightly after dipping 6% more during the strike. Outside observers have pointed out that cash flow is healthy, and the company last week reported that revenue this ski season so far has been up with higher prices on just under flat ticket sales. Plenty of analysts recommend buying MTN stock.And for all the guest anger, all the promises to never come back, well, the projections at least for winter lodging are … up. Sundance occupation looks like more than last year. Presidents’ Day and spring break looks like more, too.Of course, we’ll see. Count on crowds, though. Even through the strike while no one was going to the mountain, somehow the lines remained as long as ever.I think we’ll find ski vacationers’ memories are very short, and even Park City Mountain’s belated giveback to disgruntled skiers will be effective that way. We’ll assuredly have those long lift lines again, but no strike to blame for them.The cost of raises will ripple through the rest of the company with its 55,000 employees, and that will be interesting to see. The equation is simple but merciless in what this portends for, say, the price of Epic or Ikon passes in the coming years, along with impacts from fewer though better paid workers on and off the mountains.The beast will lumber on, unloved perhaps, while skiers and boarders get in their turns just the same, loving up Main Street and elsewhere, and the swarm of businesses dependent on all this will carry on, too.But maybe it won’t require further strikes to compensate the front-line workers a little better for what they do as the hard spine supporting all of it. One can only hope for the lesson aching to be learned here. Somehow it feels fitting that the ski patrollers would be the stern teachers about paying better attention to the employees, and perhaps in a way help rescue the company from itself.Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.The post Journalism Matters: Stern lessons from the strike appeared first on Park Record.