Crystal Mountain, ahh Crystal Mountain . . .

As many of you know, I broke my ankle a month and a half ago and in the meantime won a gold season pass to Crystal Mountain. Okay, so I didn't know I'd broken my ankle at the time because 3 different x-rays series revealed nothing. Thus, I signed the dotted line and claimed my prize.
I'm pretty much out of the running for skiing lift season and thus decided I would sell the pass, heck even give it away if selling was illegal--noooope. It's apparently all mine. A promotional offering from Crystal that's non-transferrable. It was the repeat phrase of the sales representative over and over and over again. It bugs me to no end that I pay taxes on it now, but there is no way to actually use the prize.  Maybe I'm unjustly perturbed by this, and not necessarily unexpected from Crystal (maybe other mountains too?) but felt just annoyed enough to post my mini-rant here!
Here's to a really long ski season so maybe all that promotion will go to use.

Paying taxes on it?

Perhaps try and contact John K and suggest you'd like to auction it and donate the proceeds 50:50 to the two charities of each of your choice rather than it now go completely to waste?

Sorry about your ankle.

Nothing to with Crystal, and everything to do with "winning" prizes and Federal taxes. 

About 5 years ago, my (now x) wife won an all expenses paid, grand prize trip for two to Fiji from a grocery store chain here in the PNW.  We didn't even know we were "entering" the contest, but it was based on transactions using those in-store savings cards (the one that tracks what you buy!) and a random drawing.  Anyway we're talking first class all the way and the value was in the 6 or 7K range.  Later, we received some sort of form from them (W-9?) that basically equated the prize to income.  So I paid a rather substantial amount of taxes, and the grocery store got to write off 6-7K of expenses.

Sad thing is I didn't get to go.  So I guess I'm still paying for the grand prize but having oh-so much more fun!

You are absolutely correct to be perturbed. Even if the fine print supports their position they are entirely able to handle it in any way you wish.

Go higher up, be respectful (duh, right?) and keep going higher until you find a reasonable individual.

They won't even let you GIVE it away? Preposterous.

Bummer to the max on injured reserve. You might ask if you could claim your prize for use in the 09-10 season instead of this year. CM has made a big point of shifting to a CSI culture (Customer Satisfaction Index) Speedy recovery. That is all

chica
why don't you just sell the pass or loan it out to friends since it's a season pass; skier with hat helmet and goggles should look ok to lifties.