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Show ' ' "its '''f '"'fTpppvRtfWy " I lit f " "WIWIHim'i '- S 5 . Vol. VI, No. 16 Wmm is dull tint i- ' - ' ' P.O. Plans More Boxes You say you're going through an identity crisis because the address on your Utah driver's license says "General Delivery." And you're tired of waiting for 15 minutes in line at the Post Office for three bills and a Radio Shack catalogue. Chin up. Relief is on the way. By the end of February there could be as many as 1,200 new boxes at the Park City Post Office. Park City Postmaster Brian Johnson said Friday that the Post Office plans to add between 1,000 and 1,200 new boxes by remodeling the area which now contains the letter drops directly inside the front doors. He said a new hallway would be built running east into space currently used for sorting and storage of mail. Johnson indicated the remodeling is planned for February. "It shouldn't take more than a week," he said. "It's not that big a job." Even Toasting The Snow God Hasn't Produced Any Results Fven for Park City it was a peculiar sight. It was just after 7:30 on a Friday morning. About a dozen people including in-cluding ex-eouncilwoman Eleanor Bennett were gathered in the office of the Edelweiss House. All were staring out the window toward the Resort, left hands on their heads, right hands grasping tumblers full of an orange-colored orange-colored drink. It was clearly a come-as-you-are occasion. oc-casion. Several of the ladies were sporting spor-ting nightgowns. But this was no frivolous event. There was a look of intensity on many of the laces, as if the toast had some deep religious significance. : So what had dragged these devout souls (including one haggard reporter) out of bed at such a ridiculous hour? ' The ceremony is known as a stabutik party. Its purpose, as Suzanne Rowan explains (that's Mrs. Rowan kneeling in the front ) is to bring snow to barren slopes. The tradition was apparently import l. ' iMCBWSTlDganD V;H? JLL rfMMKMIIt..' 'OTlrW " . - " ' ssiiiil He estimated that about 200 people now pick up their mail at the General Delivery window, and tyiat there are about 100 waiting for post office boxes. "We have 2,100 boxes now. So another 1,200 will expand it quite a bit." Johnson said house delivery is now available in Prospector Square, Park Meadows, Thaynes Canyon and areas farther north. The post office boxes are used largely by the residents of the older part of town where the streets are too narrow and steep for home delivery. "There are no prospects right now to expand (home) service into the older parts of town," he said. He estimated that the remodeling should handle the growth "for a couple of years, we hope. We'll continue to expand wherever we can." Johnson said there are also plans to repaint the Post Office, inside and out, within the next four to five months. ed to Utah by tourists from the Wisconsin-Minnesota area. Chuck and Suzanne Rowan, serving as managers at the Alta Lodge, were first exposed to a stabutik party in 1972. As Mrs. Rowan tells it, the early-morning early-morning ritual begins by going around the lodge knocking on doors, rousing the slumbering guests. "They might be in nightgowns, in longjohns, or with shaving cream on their faces." When the guests are assembled in one place, they are instructed to face the mountains, put their left hands on their heads, then chug a concoction made of orange juice with bourbon floating on the top. If the ritual is repeated enough times by a large enough group, the snow will come within 48 hours. The Rowans became firm believers in the power of the stabutik after a party par-ty on Dec. 2(i, 1974. As Mrs. Rowan sees it, that seven-drink seven-drink stabutik touched off a five-day snowstorm which in turn triggered an avalanche that swept five rooms of the Mm. ii ,C " i It'' -. t I " ' ill I t v . ,ila ' , ' Wednesday, December 31, 1980 Snow Woes Fewer Skiers, But More Shoppers It's starting to become the rule rather than the exception. For the third time in the past live years. Park City has lurched through the last 10 days of December, traditionally gravy time for ski resorts, with bare patches jutting through the snow. Parkwest has yet to open. The Park City Resort, officially open since late November, has yet to allow skiers on more than half its runs. The snow just isn't there. ;. , Inevitably, the lack of snow has had an impact on the Park City economy. But some local observers are seeing signs that the area is starting to become versatile enough to withstand the shock. First, the bad news. According to figures released Tuesday by Assistant Marketing Director Laura Thomas, the Resort has taken a beating. For the year to date, business is down 22 percent per-cent when compared to the same period last year, when there was also a shortage shor-tage of good snow. When compar ed to 1078, when the resort opened in mid-November mid-November and snow was plentiful, business is down a shopping 71 percent . On the bright side, Ms. Thomas noted that Christmas week i Dec'. 22 through Dec. 2tit was down only two percent over the comparable period in 1979. Meanwhile, a survey of hotels and property management companies done by the Park City Convention and Visitors' Bureau reveals that the local occupancy rate is about 60 percent this week. "A lot of people have checked in but are checking out early," Bureau spokesman spokes-man Kim Anderson said Monday. She noted that the cancellation rate is running run-ning about 40 percent, although some properties such as the Racquet Club Village have been able to hold onto as many as 83 percent of their guests. In general, refund policies have been very lenient. "Most companies have a policy that, if thtie's no snow, the customers get everything back except a handling fee," Ms. Anderson said. Now for the good hews. In spite of the obvious loss of revenue from Alta Lodge out into the parking lot . "We learned after that to face the mountain where the chairlifts are, not the one overhanging the lodge." That also taught them that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. "We got very serious about stabutiks. We thought, 'Now we can'l overdo this.' " The orange juice-bourbon concoction is supposed to be served in an hourglass-shaped container with the juice on the bottom and the bourbon on the top. Mrs. Rowan said the glasses are on order, but they were forced to settle for ordinary tumblers at their most recent stabutik. "We felt there was no time. We needed snow." Now here's the bad news. The stabutik party was held Dec. 19, almost two weeks ago. Since then there has hardly been enough snow to scrape off the windshields. "I guess we didn't drink enough ol them the other day," Mrs. Rowan suggested. "Or maybe there weren't enough of us." Mis; There was plenty l snow lor the traditional torchlight parade City Hesort. As a large croud sang carols in front of the cafeteria wound slowlv down the Pav Day run. UL Park City, Utah state visitors, many other Park City-businesses City-businesses have been doing surprisingly sur-prisingly well. "A lot of people are up a lot more than they thought they would be under the circumstances,' Amanda Peterson, executive director of (he Chamber of Commerce, said Monday. Among the big winners has been the White Pine Touring Center, where cross country business has been booming in spite of the sparse snow imp on the golf course. Both the Park City Racquet Club and the Prospector Athletic Club also report a brisk business. Many of the gift-oriented shops have Weatherman Explains Why Johnny Can't Don't lynch the weathermen. It's not their fault the Park City mountains moun-tains look like they're waiting for spring back-packers. Don't blame them if the Salt Lake Valley looks like a lake of soot. Besides there's a good chance relief is in sight. Bill Alder, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, said it is rare for winter in Utah to go longer than January without snow, and he's predicting some action by the middle mid-dle of the month. Conversely, it's also unrealistic, he said, for the snows to come in November, which may come as a shock to those merchants mer-chants who annually plan to open for Thanksgiving. Salt Lake's problem. Alder said, is a ridge of warm air which rests aloft like a mountain in the path of any cold air coming down from the northwest . "You need a fairly good storm to break it up," he said, to create a (BIF yet to teel the pinch. Mrs. Peterson suggested that much of the Christmas buying is done by people from Salt Lake City. "I talked to the Holiday Village merchants, mer-chants, and they are doing very well compared to last year," she said. She argued that the lack of snow may actually have helped some of the stores. "People are shopping more," she said. "When the skiing's crappy, they shop." But like many of the merchants, she is looking past New Year's Day with trepidation. "I think the real effects are going to be shown maybe next week." Local restaurant proprietors aren't ecstatic about their holiday business. "trough" configuration of the air currents which would let a storm slide into the area. Unfortunately, the storm fronts over the Pacific Northwest and Canada are losing most of their moisture over those areas. "They have flooding up there, where they had a lack of moisture before." he said. The cure for the condition, he said, depends on the upper air stream, and other currents circulating over the entire world. "You can seed the clouds," he said, "but you've got to have the clouds there first. Seeders may claim their activities have enhanced the rainfall by some exact percentage, say 30 percent or 40 percent. per-cent. But it is really not an exact science, Alder said. The second problem caused by the warm air "mountain" is the temperature tem-perature inversion. Warm air rises to the top, while the heavier cold air rests on the bottom of the Salt Lake Valley. "They're both where they 5-Kr( I I ;1 t . - ; , I f '1 I v J" , I -1 ' I ' ' ' ''l;-;hl. 'fl 0 1 held Christinas Kve at the Park (left ), torchhearing skiers (right ) 250 2 Sections, 20 Pages but they seem to agree that it could be a lot worse. Paul Brown, manager of Mileti's, said the past week was comparable com-parable to the same period last year, but down about a third from two years ago when the snow was plentiful. It's been better than I expected, but not as good as it should be," he said. George Schermerhorn, manager of Car 19 and Shannon's, said that business was down slightly from last year, but noted that last year may not have been a good indicator since the restaurants had just opened. Like Brown, he saw reason for optimism. "We're not off as much as we had been advised we would be," he said. Ski want to be," said Alder. As a result, Salt Lake even gets colder temperatures than Park City. The rub is that the unmoving cold air accumulates industrial soot and car fumes. Inversions are especially common to the winter months, when there is little chance for the cold dirty air to warm up and rise. "The sun has a lot more punch to it in the spring," Alder said. A rainstorm over the Christmas holiday brought a vertical ver-tical mixing to the air currents, said Alder, and it partially cleared up conditions in the valley. But the ; mog has since resettled. Alder said he expects to see a shift in conditions around the 10th of the month. So you have nothing to worry about. Snow is guaranteed, straight from the weatherman's mouth, for February, at least by March. And if it doesn't come . . . why, spring is a better time for tar and feathering anyway. |