Denver, CO – An appeals court is set to hear oral arguments today in a case of four snowboarders who filed suit against Alta Ski Area.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver will hear the case of Drew Hicken, Rick Alden, Bjorn Leines, and Richard Varga. Banding together under the banner Wasatch Equality, the Plaintiffs filed their lawsuit against Alta and the U.S. Forest Service in January 2014, alleging that the Utah ski area’s ban on snowboarding violated their constitutional rights, contending that snowboarders are a class protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Their lawsuit sought a permanent injunction lifting Alta’s snowboard ban.
The Plaintiffs disagree with Alta’s position that, as a private ski area operating on U.S. Forest Service land, they have valid business and safety purposes for maintaining the ban that has been in place since the mid-1980s. Instead, the Plaintiffs believe that the ban is founded upon hatred of snowboarders and ill-founded stereotypes.
U.S. District Court judge Dee Benson in Salt Lake City sided with the ski area and the Forest Service, and dismissed their case in September 2014, finding that in order to assert constitutional discrimination the Plaintiffs had to show that the discrimination came from the government’s actions, not from Alta’s.
“The Plaintiffs make no allegation, and have presented no evidence whatsoever, that the Forest Service did anything to influence Alta’s decision to ban snowboarders at its resort,” Benson wrote in his decision.
Last November, the Plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal.
There are only two other ski areas in the U.S. that still prohibit snowboarding, Deer Valley in Utah and Mad River Glen in Vermont. Unlike Alta, however, both of those ski areas operate on private land.