Park City Mountain Resort

Having done the Utah Interconnect..." So by the way, this was, uh, yesterday, I had Matthew Prince on the podcast.

He is a Park City native who also founded a giant tech company called CloudFl- Flare, Cloudflare, and he would like to buy Park City Mountain Resort from Vail Resorts, and he came on the pod and made his pitch yesterday for why he would do a better job than Vail.

So here's the reaction.

Jeremiah K, "Great episode.

Today is Tuesday, October 13th, 2026.

Today, we are going to talk to Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, about why he thinks Vail Resorts should sell Park City Mountain Resort to him, how he would spend a half billion dollars to improve Park City and connect the ski area to the rest of the Wasatch, and why the Epic Pass could have a place at an independent Park City.

It is a very special day in storm nation because it is the seven year anniversary of the first ever storm skiing podcast, which I sent out on October 13th, 2019.

I chose that date because my first ever day of work was October 13th, 1993 at the Meyer grocery store in Midland, Michigan.

My guest today is the co-founder, executive chairman, and CEO of Cloudflare, a publicly traded global cloud platform with a $125 billion market capitalization that is used by more than 20% of all websites on the internet.

He is also owner of the Park Record newspaper, which has published continuously in Park City since 1880.

He is a Park City native who has worked as a ski instructor at Park City Mountain Resort, which at 7,300 acres served by 42 lifts is the largest ski area in the United States.

Matthew Prince is my guest.

Yeah.

I mean, to ping around maybe a little bit on this, There still is this particular emphasis on looking to buy Park City Mountain Resort from Vale.

Which

is interesting.

But let's just start with some background on the company that is Vale.

This is the parent company whose portfolio includes Vale Mountain, Breckenridge, part of Park City Mountain, 37 North American resorts in total.

One of my favorite tickers of all time trades under MTN for mountain.

on the New York Stock Exchange, market cap of about $5 billion.

And I didn't know if maybe since they'd gone to all the expense of already buying these lifts once, maybe it just wasn't worth it because Vail has not since then been doing a ton of lifts every year.

But the answer apparently is yes, they are moving ahead with this plan to what I think is reducing some pinch points at Park City Mountain.

So I will share my screen here for those of you watching.

on YouTube or StormSkiing.com. And we're just going to take a look at Park City Mountain.

And...

There we go.

A lot of noise.

Vale has acknowledged that independent board directors have been nominated.

No opening date for them at all this year or this season.

Park City Mountain Resort, November 20th.

Powder Mountain.

So now Powder Mountain, to me, they're being more realistic, I think.

Utah residents could get passes for $60, $30 for kids.

Out-of-state visitors would pay at least twice that much.

And again, Park City Mountain Resort, $370 this upcoming season is what they're charging for a single lift pass.

So he said...

We have a ski resort here.

Park City Mountain Resort where I live is hiring ski patrollers.

I happen to know about ski patrollers because my son was one.

These are the people who provide emergency medical care, right? They're all highly trained, highly skilled people.

So Park City and Deer Valley, for example, are built on private land.

Uh, much of the land, particularly Park City Mountain Resort, is, is leased or subleased or had to be bought over time.

Uh, Alta and Snowbird are both on patchworks of public and private land.

So it, it's hard to find a solid patch of land in Utah to begin with.

Um, when he, they talked about affordability and accessibility for, for locals, uh, in the ski, uh, industry, which is, you know, locals are basically being priced out, not just here in Utah, everywhere.

And so he said, uh, that he'd been thinking about since then, but he said what actually made him decide to file the paperwork, create this nonprofit, get the coalition together, and try to press at least a discussion about this at the state legislative level, he said it was when Park City Mountain Resort unveiled their new slogan earlier this year for the upcoming season.

This was in, I believe, May.

Uh, for the upcoming ski season, should we get one? Uh, they, they unveiled the slogan, uh, larger than life.

And, um, he said for some reason that just irritated him.

knowing that his family, most Utah families, can't afford a single-day lift pass trip to Park City Mountain Resort at the most expensive in the state, he said, I posted on Instagram that I was irate about this.

Utahns can't afford to ski.

because skiing has gotten so popular and all of our resorts are catering to more well-moneyed folks, usually from out of state, who can afford the season passes at multi-resort passes.