I am leaving this morning for my annual retreat to the mountains. This year we are going to Park City, Utah, which we decided to do about a year ago.

The reason we chose this particular place is because Vail Resorts spent $50 million over the offseason to merge Park City Mountain Resort with the neighboring Canyons Resort. 

There’s now a mountain-to-mountain gondola and 7,300 acres of skiable area across the two resorts, which makes it the largest ski resort in the United States. And that’s why, this month, the New York Times named it one of the 52 places you need to visit in 2016. 

But it’s not all puppy dogs and ice cream. What kickstarted this transformation was that the previous operator of Park City, Powdr Corporation, actually forgot to renew its sweetheart land lease.

So if you’re at all interested in skiing, snowboarding, real estate, and/or lawsuits, you might be interested in what happened here. Curbed did a summary of the battle last year. It was big news in the ski world.

Image via the New York Times