Deer Valley Resort’s giant expansion is going at full throttle this summer on the East Village side. There’s not much time to spare.
An estimated 1,958 new skiable acres with 81 new runs are scheduled to open this next ski season. The resort opened three lifts and 316 acres last season.
The construction project numbers are bit overwhelming: 140,000 feet of new snowmaking water pipes, 1,100 new snow guns, a 60,000-square-foot day lodge and gondola cabin garage, an 8,000-square-foot temporary skier services building at the East Village base, and a 24,000 square-foot maintenance and pump-house building, known as the Hail Peak operations building.
Five new chair lifts are under construction this summer. Among those is the Pinyon Express, which will be a six-pack bubble chair, along with a two-part gondola with a mid-station allowing skiers to exit or continue on to Park Peak and ski the 9,350-foot peak just south of Bald Mountain. Neptune Express will serve terrain between the base of the Jordanelle Gondola and the East Village base.
When all of the expansion is complete, the total acreage of skiable terrain at Deer Valley is projected to be 5,726 acres, making Deer Valley among the largest ski resorts in America.
“I think this will be single handedly the biggest summer execution operation that Alterra has ever done. And I can’t think of another in the ski industry,” Senior Construction Manager Mike Walker said.
“We have a lot of challenges and a lot of work to do between now and then to get all of that accomplished,” Director of Mountain Operations Garrett Lang said. “But it is our goal and our intent to have seven lifts operational and all of the corresponding terrain available in the 2025-26 season” in the expanded area.
They have about six months before the next opening day.
Deer Valley is working with Doppelmayr, whose U.S. headquarters is in Salt Lake City, on the aerial system in the expansion.
The keystone is the East Village gondola. Riders will board one of 140 cabins with a capacity of 10 passengers at the base of East Village, ride to the mid-mountain angle station at Dutch Peak, at 8,170 feet. There skiers will have a choice of exiting or stay in the cabin, which will automatically detach from one haul cable to another and climb to the top terminal at Parks Peak, at 9,100 feet. That’s a vertical climb of 2,570 feet above the East Village base.
Lang said the two-cable system, each with separate bottom and top terminal buildings, will give his operations team the ability to shut down the upper portion in high winds and keep the lower portion running.
Another high-profile lift will be the Pinyon Express lift, a six-pack bubble that starts at the backside of Flagstaff and Bald mountains. It will ferry skiers to the top of Park Peak for access to easier high-elevation, open-glade skiing. This lift will likely be the primary way for skiers who ski the existing or front side of Deer Valley to access the expanded terrain. The design team at Deer Valley expects that terrain off the top of Park Peak will be skiable late into the season because of its 9,350-foot elevation.
Allison Palmintere, director of communications for Ski Utah, said this is largest ski resort expansion in Utah’s history, and one of the largest in North America.
“It’s a massive undertaking,” she said.
