“You shall not pass!”
The very first statement listed in Alta’s mountain policy is pretty simple, pretty direct: Alta is a skier’s mountain. Snowboarding is not allowed.
Of course, the Utah resort’s ski-only policy is longstanding and well-known. It wasn’t all that controversial several decades ago because Alta was once part of the majority on this exact stance – the idea that snowboarders were a safety liability to others was held onto in the culture. But as snowboarding’s popularity steadily grew into the 1990s, the bans dissipated at resorts. Alta, Deer Valley, and Mad River are the United States’ last three holdouts on this one. And as shown in its published policy in 2024, the folks calling the shots at Alta don’t feel compelled to elaborate on or justify the policy. As one snowboarder learned in a video that started circulating the internet this weekend, it just is what it is.
“It’s kind of what we do here,” an Alta lifty tells him, below.
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Ski-only areas made perfect sense from a business standpoint 35 to 40 years ago. Snowboarding wasn’t popular enough to override what most skiers saw as an annoyance, rational or not, and the assurance you weren’t going to cross any snowboards was an obvious selling point. And somehow Alta outlived even that era, stuck to its guns, continued turning away business from snowboards, and is still enforcing a poles-only policy beyond the days where it’s even snobbish anymore. It just…is.
From a logistical standpoint, Alta Ski Area is known to have a lot of area to traverse. But that doesn’t stop some backcountry devotees from sneaking in some covert lines whenever possible. And in 2016, a federal court upheld the resort’s old school ban.
As Sr. Editor Joe Carberry pointed out at the time, “for Alta heads to stubbornly stay this old school on something like this, it’d have to be about branding (cause it sure as hell ain’t about money as the resort doesn’t seem to be worried about the bucket loads it’s missed out on over the years).”
It’s kind of what they do there.
