Vail Mountain has 17 other restaurants, and the resort is designed so that the dozens of restaurants in Vail Village, Lionshead are easily accessible from the mountain for lunch. Not only are the Ski Patrol facilities at PHQ being replaced with a modular building, but crews are adding another Ski Patrol post at Wildwood which will allow even better service to the Wildwood Express, Game Creek Bowl and Avanti Express areas than ever before. The Mountain will open as scheduled on November 6 and the World Alpine Championships are not at all affected. The race courses are more than two miles from the areas that were affected, and all of the lifts will be operating and all of the temporary facilities will be in place long before the Championships begin on January 30. The conspirators who carried out this arson do an injustice to the environmental ideal.
Skiers are environmentalists.
Ski areas allow more people to recreate in the great outdoors than any other entity aside from beaches. Ski areas are among the very best uses for the National Forests - more people skied, snowboarded, or hiked on Vail Mountain last year than hiked in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon combined. The extremists who try to thwart responsible skiers and ski resorts at every turn include some very selfish people. They don't want more Americans to enjoy the environment as they choose to. Many of us are not prepared to camp in the wilderness or are not fit to safely climb to mountain vistas.