Kathy Anderson, left, and her husband Chris Anderson hold the shot ski in the air, celebrating a record-breaking shot ski during the Park City Sunrise Rotary's second annual event on Main Street Saturday afternoon, October 14, 2017. 1,250 people came out to the event aimed to break the record for world's longest shot ski.

Tanzi Propst/The Park Record

The Park City Sunrise Rotary Club’s Second Annual Shot Ski blew away expectations on Saturday, bringing more than a thousand people downtown to witness Park City reclaim the title of “world’s longest shot ski” from Breckenridge, Colorado.

Breckenridge took the title away in January, when the fellow ski town did 1,234 shots during its Norse-themed Ullr Fest. In 2016, the Sunrise Rotary set the initial record at 1,000 shots.

The records are not adjudicated by Guinness World Records, which “no longer considers applications for records involving the rapid consumption of alcohol,” according to its website.

Back in Park City, 1,250 people took their places and threw back half of a cup of Wasatch Brewery beer, raising a total of more than $10,000 for the Park City Sunrise Rotary Club.

Mike Luers, a Rotarian who led the engineering effort on the shot ski, said donors supplied 476 skis for use in the event. The skis ran 2,225 feet down Main Street in a “U” shape, which allowed the shot ski to cover twice the distance without closing down more of the thoroughfare. Luers’ team rounded out the U with a series of hinges built to tip backwards simultaneously and supply beer to the 1,250 shot takers. The mechanism ran from the top of Main Street to the Post Office, with gloves and hats adorning cups where people were saving their spots before the event.

Tickets for the event, running from $20 for an unreserved spot on the ski to $500 for VIP placement, went toward the Sunrise Rotary’s funds and will be used for community grants. Rotary fundraising director Connie Nelson said the event’s turnout surpassed gloomy initial expectations, which took into account a morning snowfall.

“We were afraid there’d be a lot of attrition … there was so much snow, and we were short 388 [tickets] two days ago,” Nelson said. “We had people who wanted to get on the shot and we didn’t have room for them.”

The afterparty consisted of a beer garden, yard games, a taco truck and live music with Salt Lake-based bluegrass band Pixie and the Partygrass Boys in the Wasatch Brewpub parking lot. In the midst of the party, Justin Morgan, a participant in the event and a Park City resident, said he thinks he knows why Park City triumphed over its Colorado rival: Parkites are just better at drinking.

“If you really think about it, this year we barely made it but I really want to smash it next year to a point where Breckenridge can’t do it, because I think there are more people in Park City that are willing to do a shot ski,” Morgan said. “That’s what it comes down to for a world record, right there.”

Applications for grants from the Park City Sunrise Rotary Club are open until Oct. 31. Apply online here.