Photo: Park City Mountain // Instagram
In an interview with KPCW radio in Park City, former-ski-instructor-turned-tech-billionaire Matthew Prince has shared that he wants to purchase Park City Mountain Resort. Prince revealed the news along with a vision for the resort’s future on the local radio station’s Mountain Money show Monday morning, saying that he spoke to Park City parent company Vail Resorts about a purchase but the company wasn’t interested in a sale. That apparently hasn’t closed the door for him, however.
“I reached out and that offer still stands, and it would not be hard,” Prince said. “This feels like it is one of these things that has to be inevitable. So I think it’s very unlikely that I own Park City [Mountain] in the next five years, but the next 50? I think having local owners really matters.”
The offer isn’t entirely out of the blue. Prince has recently purchased the Town Lift Plaza, making him the owner of restaurant and retail spaces at the base of Park City Mountain. He envisions upgrades to the Town Lift, which could include a gondola that would connect Main Street to Solitude and Alta.
“Let’s think big,” Prince said. “Why stop at Park City? You can, with a fairly clear right-of-way, go straight from Main Street Park City in the same length of time – 22 minutes – that it takes to ride the Town Lift today, all the way to Alta, with a stop at Solitude along the way. How amazing would that be? Could we make this like Europe?”
Prince, who was a ski instructor at Park City Mountain Resort before he became the CEO of Cloudflare, says the city has “ground to a halt” in growing toward that vision largely because of Vail. He proposed that local ownership rather than corporate/investor ownership would combat some of the problems, and admitted in the interview that in his opinion, he’s lost faith in Vail Resorts’ ability to manage his hometown mountain.
“I see them as having largely given up on Park City and that’s really sad for a mountain that I care enormously about,” he said.
