Deer Valley will embark on one of the largest terrain expansions in US ski history over the next decade in partnership with Extell Development Company. As part of the Expanded Excellence vision, Alterra Mountain Company will develop ski operations in the area previously known as Mayflower with nine new lifts opening in the 2025-26 season and seven more to follow. All told, Deer Valley will more than double in size to 5,726 acres with 37 lifts.
The majority of the new terrain will launch in late 2025 with 110 new runs and a 2,900 foot vertical drop. Extell will continue to develop the base portal it has been building along US-40, which guests can reach seamlessly from Salt Lake City. Alterra will manage the mountain experience under a long term operating agreement and skiers will enjoy the same elevated service and amenities they have since 1981, albeit on a dramatically larger footprint. Deer Valley expects to hire 2,000 employees to support this expansion along with additional parking and workforce housing.
New York-based Extell embarked on the Mayflower project years ago with a purchase of 40 acres and acquired more than 20 parcels since. Company founder and President Gary Barnett noted negotiations with Alterra were intense at times and a deal was only finalized this week. With the two companies in agreement, skiers will enjoy an improved ski experience under the Deer Valley brand rather than having to choose between two adjacent, competing ski resorts.
Construction has already begun on the base portal and new terrain. The flagship of the expanded lift system will be a 10 passenger gondola spanning nearly 10,000 linear feet from the new base portal to Park Peak with a mid angle station. A dozen detachable chairlifts and three fixed grip lifts will also service the expansion at full buildout. A majority will be quads in Deer Valley tradition with manufacturer(s) to be determined.
“Deer Valley Resort is committed to building upon our legacy as one of the world’s most exceptional ski areas while staying true to our founding principles created over four-decades ago,” said Todd Bennett, President and COO of Deer Valley Resort. “This expansion will facilitate even better access to the resort for our guests, while offering a substantial increase in world-class amenities consistent with the resort’s original vision.”
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Looks like a great expansion project but at what cost. I suspect that ticket prices will need to be raised quite a bit to pay for this.
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From what I understand, Extell is paying for most of the additional infrastructure and overall capex. Deer Valley is on the hook for most of the ongoing opex, but they will be raising their daily skier cap as more terrain and facilities are open. I suspect prices will increase at relatively the same rate as they have been for years.
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raised from 280 dollars a day well it was already bad, maybe it will shift some traffic away from the Cottonwood Canyons
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Doesn’t much of that additional terrain face south? Does it even hold snow?
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I was just checking on Google Maps. The large bowl above the base area has primarily a northeastern exposure. At higher elevations, it’s a mix of northern, southern, and eastern exposures with the trails in the above drawing mostly on the northern exposures.
I’m more intrigued by the base elevation … 6400′ is verrrry low for western skiing.
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Yeah, it’s going to need some hefty snowmaking. Snowbasin has a base of 6300, canyons is 6800, and Woodward park city is 6400. Yeah, it can be done but I would be concerned about the warmer years that we have especially on the southern-facing slopes near the base.
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This will be a great ski area for those who want to experience New England skiing.
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Honestly tho the type of skiers that go to places like Deer Valley probably don’t really care for the skiing that much and are really just there for the Spa, restaurants, and resort experience.
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@Cameron I gotted the joke.
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Most of the skiable terrain will be at a decent elevation and face either north or east. Yes, plenty of lower-elevation terrain is coming online, but much of it will be for real estate access. South Peak and Park Peak, where Deer Valley will get its first pods with verticals above 2000 ft, will bottom out at a respectable ~7000 ft. Big Dutch Peak’s main pod will have a similar bottom elevation, albeit with a lower vertical. For some reference, Tombstone at Park City has its bottom terminal at ~7200 ft.
Deer Valley will also be getting its first high-elevation beginner area. The new beginner terrain above Ontario/Trump will only go down to ~8600 ft, which is entirely above High Meadow at Park City!
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The base of Mayflower is still 4000 feet higher than the Base of Whistler (6000ft vs 2000ft), while not being near the ocean and getting decent natural snow at lower elevations, so I dont understand why people think the lower areas of the Mayflower expansion wont be good skiing, unless you consider 90% of Whistlers vertical to be bad quality skiing (realistically, only the bottom 2000 vertical of whistler is subpar) . Obviously Whistler has a more Northern location, but its proximity to the ocean, negates any of that benefit.
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I don’t think you can compare base elevations from region to region. Especially a more northern coastal area vs an inland area. All of the NW areas have lower base elevations than 6000 except for a couple. Despite the lower elevations they have very large snowpacks but heavier snow.
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I also question building nine lifts in one year. Has any ski resort anywhere in the world ever done that? The only parallel I can think of is Sochi in Russia prior to the 2014 Olympics but even Utah has a more robust regulatory regime than putinist russia not to mention a shortage of labor
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ASC built 7 lifts at The Canyons in 1997. The order had to be split between three manufacturers.
The plan is to build phase one lifts throughout 2024 and 2025 including the winter in between.
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I wonder how many manufacturers will be called in for this. I hope that they choose a smaller manufacturer for the fixed grips.
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It was only a matter of time before the partnership was officially announced, but it is still quite exciting! 9 new lifts being constructed in ’24 and ’25 will be a large order, and that gondola will be quite the machine spanning almost 14000 feet. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Mayflower finally upgraded and extended to the top of Bald Mountain as well, as that will now have a lot of incoming traffic from the new portal.
With Snow Park also being developed, the multiple villages scattered around 5726 acres of skiing will make Deer Valley feel very European.
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In addition to Mayflower, given the high elevation terrain appears behind Bald Mountain, I would think they will need to capacity upgrade (six packs?) on all of the lifts on Bald Mountain.
Especially Wasatch (and potentially Sultan as well). I would also guess they are considering extending the upcoming Silver Lake Gondola with a mid-station at Silver Lake to the top of Bald Mountain (potentially replacing Sterling).
If it were me i would realign Sterling anyway to have it start at the bottom of Flagstaff, potentially where Judge starts currently.
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They are considering making the gondola four sections. New base area -> mid-station -> Park Peak -> Silver Lake -> Snow Park.
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Really? That’s interesting. Was this mentioned in their presentation? I didn’t see that anywhere.
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I don’t think ALL the lifts on Bald Mt need upgraded, at least not immediately. Sterling of course is the most logical one to be upgraded to a six pack, unless that becomes a section of gondola to connect with the new gondola.
After Sterling, in my opinion Quincy needs upgraded to a six pack before Wasatch or Sultan, as there’s always lines there to get on to Flagstaff Mt. Even Northside could do with an upgrade before Wasatch or Sultan.
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Peter, this line from your writeup stood out to me.
“With nine new lifts opening in the 2025-26 season and seven more to follow.”
Did they give any indication which ones come first and which ones will follow?
Also, seems like everything was pushed back a year. I’m almost positive that they said lifts would come online for 24/25. Now it’s 25/26.
As a lifelong Utahn, I’m really excited for this! Some of these upper lifts could be quite fun.
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So there will soon be a town in the USA with over 13,000 acres of skiing. Dang…where will everyone stay?
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Park city is full of vacation homes and hotels. Probably more than any other ski town in the USA. I wouldn’t be too worried as more are currently being built.
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I’m going to guess that Doppelmayr will be building the new lifts for the expansion. Though on the other hand, it’s also possible they could go with Leitner-Poma for some of them.
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It will be interesting to see whether the full expansion ever comes to fruition, and how often this area will actually be open. It doesn’t hold snow well, and it’s pretty low-elevation. My money’s on climate change in this fight, sadly.
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Lots of snowmaking planned.
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It’s also expensive as hell, and wet bulb temps are not guaranteed. Even with snowmaking this isn’t exactly a prime ski area location.
Would love to see the operating cost assumptions and what they average out to in reality over the first few years.
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Any figures on what snowmaking costs are per acre?
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$1000-$5000 to cover 1 acre with 1 foot of snow is the general estimate. It depends on the level of automation of the system, cost of electricity, cost of water, and cost of labor.
If we take the high-end estimate ($5000) and multiply it by the new snowmaking coverage (615 acres at full-build) and 2 feet of snow (the size base generally required for opening), we get $6.15 million per season in additional snowmaking cost. It is not an exact science because some seasons will require little to no snowmaking while others will require rebuilds, but this gives a good look at what the maximum annual snowmaking opex could be. $6.15 million may sound expensive, but it is a drop in the bucket for Deer Valley, and their revenue will only grow with more skiers on the hill.
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Not sure that’s exactly on-brand in a state advertising the “Greatest Snow on Earth”
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You are correct. Lower Jordanelle already gets slushy in the middle of the season a lot of years. It can be hard to get temps to run the guns down there as well. Half of this new terrain is in that area and I just don’t think it will ski very well at all and it will be a disaster at the base.
It only gets worse and worse as time goes on. Last season was a false hope unfortunately.
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Thanks for bringing your extreme pessimism to this forum. Appreciated.
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Not pessimism, just reality. I have a bit of experience building out and maintaining runs at DV and the bottom of Jordanelle is like another world, a very warm and mushy world.
Almost every storm we would get it would be raining by the time you get down with 200 vertical feet of Jordanelle gondola.
A lot of that terrain above will be great, no doubt. But the base area is at a very challenging elevation.
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Snowbasin and Woodward Park City have low elevations, they just have lots of snowmaking.
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The temperatures at the base of Snowbasin and Woodward are a lot colder than the location of this new expansion though. For sure every square inch of these lower runs will be covered thick in snowmaking just like is done with Lower Jordanelle, but there will be some years that they may not be able to make enough snow to open until later in December or possibly January without downloading to the base.
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They don’t tho. The temperatures are very comparable. Let’s not also forget about sundance sitting at 6100 ft.
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Right, but no other locations mentioned in this thread – Snowbasin, Sundance, Canyons etc…. – sit across the street from 200-300K acre feet of water that is at a temperature well above freezing year-round. The micro-climate of the reservoir plus downsloping winds on the very tip of the Wasatch Back warm this area up beyond what would be expected just going by elevation.
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I am holding most of my review for when this does come on line….for the time being it is going to be interesting to ski new terrain and experience a new area, but on the other hand if it’d like in years past then some will be a drag to ski thought since the snow is nothing but mush….but when the snow is great like this past year, were in for a exciting time…but again will wait and see what happens in the future. Thank you Peter for reporting this.
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I’m hopeful and confident that they will figure it out. I would not imagine these companies would spend millions, if not billions on this massive expansion if it won’t dramatically elevate the whole resort experience.
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I imagine that 10 pax gondola will be very similar to Wild Blue at Steamboat.
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The best skiing at DV currently is in the Empire/Lady Morgan area and Bald Mtn. It looks like the Park Peak and South Peak areas will probably compliment that nicely.
Mayflower just merging into DV also makes a lot of sense, it was never going to be able to operate independently, and the focus on real estate first is right in line with the Deer Valley brand.
I assume this will probably suck up a fair bit of Alterra’s capex, and while from a business perspective it’s logical, it’s disappointing from a skiing perspective. They have a lot of needs across the entire portfolio, and they have a lot of mountains that do have premier terrain on offer.
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Alterra will have limited capex here. Snow Park, and the new Silver Lake Gondola replacement, will be taking up a good chunk of capex.
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Think about the pressure this puts on PCR. Vail and s gonna have to put more $$$$ into the PC side to keep abreast with DV.
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Yes and no. While they’re neighbours, PCMR and Deer Valley aren’t shooting for the same clientele.
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No snowboarding, what a joke, good luck with that.
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No snow boarding has worked for a few decades for Deer Vally so no reason why it won’t continue to be successful in the future.
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I know that this project had some sort of DOD help.. Active duty military gets a break on lodging. I hope veterans will get a break similar to Vails deal.
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Does anyone else think it might shift some traffic from the Cottonwoods, maybe not Brighton but the others. I doubt it considering how stupidly high the DV ticket price it and it will only get higher
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It may help with the crowds of Ikon pass holders who don’t want to wait hours at the canyons every weekend to ski.
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Who is the contractor in charge of the expansion-ie, hotels, condos, etc
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What is this supposed lift 3 that is planning to go in this upcoming year?
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I am an Alta-Bird season pass holder and I welcome the Deer Valley/Mayflower expansion. I’m skeptical the project will divert much traffic away from the Cottonwoods, more likely with greater skier traffic overall throughout the Wasatch, if anything the traffic in the Cottonwoods will increase, and while I’ll ski DV a few times once they open the top to bottom gondola, for reasons mentioned above, the snow quality will pale in comparison to the Upper Cottonwoods experience. But I think the DV/MF expansion will be wildly successful as a year round resort, even if the “winter” season at MF runs only from Christmas to March.
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Has Deer Valley announced a more detailed map of the new lifts/terrain, and specifically which 9 lifts will go live in phase 1?
Also, from the map they released, it looks like we’ll be able to ski down from top of Flagstaff Mtn to a new lift that will go up to Park Peak? If so, this is great. We stay in Empire Pass area, and it will be nice to be able to ski over to the Park Peak / South Peak area without having to ski down to the base.
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