KUER0%
Virtual gondola tour imagines a ‘40-person bus’ flying over Little Cottonwood Canyon 69%
By Pamela McCall0%
5/12/2026, 1:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Negativity Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Pessimism Bias as the most egregious example at 19.1% saturation with 201 hits. Analysis detected 1,690 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,053 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 62% and a BS Rank of 69% (6,898 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 68.50% of the article peer group.
The proposed gondola in Little Cottonwood Canyon would require 22 towers — from neighborhoods at the mouth of the canyon to historic Alta Lodge.
The tallest of the towers would be 262 feet, or about the height of a 26-story building.
And for opponents fighting the project, like the nonprofit Canyon Guard, that’s a lot of man-made scaffolding over 8 miles.
So they created an online virtual tour, called Under a Steel Sky, to give people a chance to imagine what it would look like.
“We wanted to show just how big this project is going to be, how tall the towers are going to be, and how big the footprint is going to be,” said Canyon Guard’s Executive Director Charlie Luke.
“Talking with elected officials, we found that this is much different than a lot of folks had envisioned.
Seeing the practical reality is something that is causing folks to question, you know, whether this really is the right decision.”
Canyon Guard used information published by the Utah Department of Transportation to create the virtual tour.
Luke said the gondola and towers that support it would directly impact the view for people living in three nearby neighborhoods: Cottonwood Heights, Granite and Sandy.
“People who live by it will essentially have a 40-person bus flying over their house.”
The towers would run parallel to the road the entire way up the canyon.
There would be two stops — one at Snowbird Ski Resort and the other at Alta Ski Area.
Luke said that while the gondola could run in the summer, there are no plans for that in UDOT’s final Environmental Impact Statement.
“The only real beneficiaries being Snowbird skiers and Alta skiers.
If you recreate, if you hike in the summer, this gondola will not benefit you.
If you are a backcountry skier, and unless you're going to those two resorts, this will not benefit you.
If you live in the canyon or the base of the canyon or up the canyon, the gondola will not benefit you,” Luke said.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pamela McCall: Little Cottonwood Canyon has a history of mining and industrial activity, and a smelter was once located at Tanners Flat.
Is the gondola any different than the human activity and disruption already in the canyon?
Charlie Luke: The mining destruction took place over 100 years ago.
There was some silver, some gold, but the vast majority was heavy metals, and the concern is with Little Cottonwood Creek, and, you know, being one of the primary channels of watershed.
I mean, the restrictions are very strict for a reason.
When you start stirring up a lot of that material that's been dormant for 100 years, we just don't know what that impact is going to be.
But it was severe enough that Salt Lake City Public Utilities, along with the metropolitan water districts of Salt Lake and Sandy, are two of the plaintiffs in suits against UDOT regarding the gondola.
PM: So what’s the impact of tower 9, which would be at Tanners Flat campground?
CL: The Tanners Flat piece is going to be an angle station, which requires a 5-acre footprint.
That is how massive, you know, that footprint is going to be for that specific area.
The average footprint for most of these towers will be about a quarter of an acre.
Each tower will have to have individual access and maintenance roads built to it; you will have security perimeters around it.
PM: What about avalanches in that area?
CL: UDOT is saying that the towers are built outside of the avalanche path.
That is not what we've looked at.
One of the talking points that folks in support of the gondola use is that this will help prevent, you know, an avalanche or help with avalanche mitigation.
It actually will not, because, just like the road, the gondola will have to be closed during avalanche mitigation, so there really is no direct benefit over buses.
PM: How do you see Tower 8 impacting what the virtual tour calls an important wildlife corridor?
CL: You're impacting an area that, for the most part, has been undisturbed.
You know, the road has been there for pretty much ever.
There used to be a rail line that is now, you know, one of the most popular hiking paths in the canyon.
And so, you know, wildlife are used to disturbance.
But again, the impact of having, you know, something overhead has yet to be seen.
And with the different access roads and other equipment that would have to come in to build and maintain the gondola, there will certainly be much more wildlife disruption than there currently is.
PM: What’s significant about Tower 19, which would be at the base of the Goldminer’s Daughter Lodge near the base of Alta’s Collins lift?
CL: That kind of tower is going to be a massive visual disruption to, you know, what people have come to love with skiing Alta, with being up Little Cottonwood Canyon, not only for the winter, but for the summer as well.
While the gondola will not operate in the summer, you will still have, you know, that visual blight when you're up looking at the wildflowers, you're up looking at everything else.
PM: What about people who wouldn't otherwise brave the traffic and would have new access to the canyon because of the gondola?
CL: You would still have to brave the same traffic to get to the gondola.
If you're concerned about, you know, sitting in traffic in the canyon, you're going to have to sit in traffic to get to the gondola and to park in the base station in the first place.
The gondola will take about 50 minutes to get to Alta, not 15, but five zero.
It takes, you know, on a very bad day, you know, an hour, you know, a couple of hours, if you're, if you're in the red snake.
But normally it takes you about 30 minutes to drive up, so you're already going to be exchanging valuable ski time to ride in the gondola.
Click here to take Canyon Guard’s virtual Little Cottonwood Canyon gondola tour.
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