Appeals Court: Ski Resort Can Tell Snowboarders To Scram

Utah’s Alta Ski Area can maintain its long-held ban on snowboarders, after a federal appeals court this week rebuffed a legal challenge from a group of locals. At the heart of the lawsuit was the question of whether ski resorts, which depend on leasing land from the U.S. Forest Service, have the right to ban or single out one particular type of user’s access, when public land is meant to be open to all. A group calling itself Wasatch Equality, which included professional snowboarder Bjorn Leines, filed suit in 2014 saying the ban violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. But the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals said Alta’s choice to enforce the ban was not influenced by the U.S. Forest Service, and therefore it was not a state action that could have amounted to discrimination.