What the Heck Is Going on at Deer Valley? Inside the Sprawling, 2,000 Acre Ski Resort Expansion

Deer Valley, I think, is one of skiing’s ultimate Rorschach tests. 

It’s in Park City, Utah, a historic and ritzy ski town where you might spot a celebrity or a candy pink G-Wagon. Snowboarders aren’t allowed, making Deer Valley one of three mountains in North America with the unique and, to some, outdated policy (Alta Ski Area and Mad River Glen are also skier-only). At an après hut on the mountain, you can sip on champagne and buy an item known as the “Seafood Tower,” which comes with shrimp, oysters, and crab legs and costs an eye-watering $325.

If Deer Valley is caviar, I know plenty of skiers who would ask for a BLT instead. 

This isn’t only ostentatiousness, though. Like a fine-dining restaurant chasing a Michelin star, the resort is focused on delivering the best possible experience for visitors, which they call the “Deer Valley Difference.” In other words, that means attentive employees, manicured groomers, and food that easily outclasses calcified heat lamp chicken tenders, all at a premium price. 

This season, that “difference” has become improbably large, with the addition of multiple lifts and more than 2,000 acres of skiable terrain. Deer Valley is now one of the biggest ski mountains on the continent, rivaling titans like Mt. Bachelor and Sun Peaks in sheer scale. 

Here’s the fitting tagline: “Expanded Excellence.”

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Fresh Off the Assembly Line

“When you're in the middle of it, you truly do understand, ‘Oh my gosh, this is insanely huge,” Riley Elliott, Deer Valley’s communications specialist, tells me as we trundle up a chairlift on our way to a place where the new and old sections of the resort meet. 

We wound around the back of Bald Mountain and paused, looking out at Park Peak. Just a few years ago, there would’ve been an orange and black rope line here, flapping in the breeze, followed by quiet trees and untouched snow. Now, we could push off into what amounts to an entire new resort.

That’s how the expansion started when Extell, a development company known for its New York City skyscrapers, set out to construct a ski area that abutted Deer Valley. Rumors swirled about what would become of the fledgling mountain, which, at the time, was called Mayflower.

In the summer of 2023, those rumors were put to rest when the developers and Deer Valley’s parent company, Alterra, announced an agreement: Deer Valley would absorb and operate the resort, while Extell would focus on the slew of and private hotels that came with it.

Much of the Expanded Excellence terrain encompasses the kinds of gentle slopes Deer Valley has staked its reputation on. The Green Monster trail spans 4.8 miles, winding from the expansion’s peak all the way to the new base area at a leisurely pace. Atop Park Peak, the Pinyon Express serves as a high-altitude beginner enclave, with blue and green trails surrounded by mountain panoramas.

As I skied around, though, I caught flashes of sterner stuff. The frontside of Park’s Peak spills away into an above-treeline slope with plenty of pitch and powder day potential. Redemption Ridge plummets 2,600 vertical feet along the expansion’s current edge, with a picturesque cruiser on top and steep shots on its flanks. 

In a nod to a preexisting Deer Valley classic, the resort has taken to calling the Ridge “Stein's Way on steroids.” Even with a juiced-up callsign, Corbet’s Couloir, this is not. Still, the new runs mean Deer Valley 2.0 can further satisfy skiers who have a penchant for speed and adrenaline. 

“It’s added more advanced terrain that the resort was missing,” says Elliott.

So far, ten new lifts, seven of which were installed ahead of the 2025-26 season, crisscross those slopes. 

Each is coated in Deer Valley’s signature green, and, collectively, they feature gizmos like bubble covers, automatic safety bars, and heated seats. One, a ten-person gondola, is the lynchpin, cutting through the middle of the expansion and dropping skiers off at its highest point.

Peter Landsman, the man behind the ropeway news source Lift Blog and all-around chairlift guru, recently stopped by Deer Valley to check out the digs.

“It was really amazing to get to see it in the inaugural season,” he says. Landsman’s outlet doubles as a massive compendium of North America’s chairlifts with photos and stats. To keep it current, he spends his free time traveling from resort to resort, documenting lifts. 

Despite all he’s seen, what’s happening at Deer Valley is, to him, new. “It's totally unprecedented in my lifetime,” Landsman, who’s 36, says. The one recent point of comparison he noted was Canyons, which, under the now-defunct American Skiing Company, saw the upgrade and addition of 11 new lifts starting in 1997 (Canyons has since been folded into Deer Valley’s neighbor, Park City). 

I wondered if Big Sky, Montana, with its fleet of shiny new lifts, came close to Deer Valley in the present day—at least if you’re talking about ropeways. Landsman thought so.

“But,” he continues, “Deer Valley also has done a massive trail project, snow making—I mean, over 1,000 new snow guns. They've done several new buildings, all the new hotels. So when you combine all that, it's really unrivaled in North America.”

Uncharted Territory 

At this point, Deer Valley’s foray is, in a way, uncharted.

Speaking with locals, you’re left with the sense that they, too, haven’t had a chance to figure out what it’s all about, given its size and newness. Of course, the tranche of runs is catalogued on the trail map, but, as any skier knows, trail maps can only go so far—the real gems often don’t have official names. There’s the paper, and then there’s the network we build in our heads as we get to know a resort better. 

“It's gonna take me at least two seasons to learn all this terrain, probably three or four,” says Kaylin Richardson.

Coming from her, that means something. Driving rain had soured my first afternoon at Deer Valley, but the next morning, when I met Richardson, the sun was peering through the clouds. Plus, up high, some of that rain had turned to snow. Richardson has spent years skiing the original Deer Valley and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the area. She knew how to capitalize right away.

For our first run, we dipped into the trees. Mist glimmered faintly orange as it caught light beams. Instead of a jagged rain crust, the snow underfoot was pliable with a creamy layer on top.

Richardson raced ahead, and I, almost immediately, regretted wearing a second base layer. Her form didn’t break. The slope was ungroomed, but she could have been on a World Cup course. Meanwhile, I was pouring sweat as I tried to keep up.

It was the outcome I expected. 

Richardson is one of Deer Valley’s seven Ski With a Champion athletes, which, essentially, means she’s a great hang and a ripping skier. During each lift ride, she dispensed wisecracks, motivation, and stories from her varied career in equal measure. 

Before joining the Champion cadre, she went to two Olympics. Later, she pivoted into freeskiing, earning a spot as a Warren Miller Entertainment regular, all on the strength of her turns. “I wanted to ski more,” she says. “When you're a ski racer, you ski, basically, the training run and the race hill.”

The gladed run we took to start the day was one highlight among many as we ventured from one end of Deer Valley to the other, covering countless acres. We scored more fresh, if soggy, snow somewhere near the Empire lift in one of Richardson’s spots and, to cap off the tour, blazed down Stein’s Way. 

Redemption, clearly a headliner, jumped out first when I asked Richardson about her favorite part of the expansion. She described a sleeper powder day there, how she made swooping super G turns through the fluff. Richardson’s accustomed to busier runs, but Redemption, that day, was quiet. Most people had headed to Deer Valley’s longtime expert haunt, Empire, meaning Richardson could open it up.

“I think it's funny, because people are like ‘Everyone’s just talking about Redemption!’” she says. “And I'm like, ‘But it is that good.’”

A Question of Altitude

Utah and many western states have been locked in a snow drought this season. 

There have been powder days, but fewer than skiers are used to. Against that backdrop, in the run-up to the debut of Expanded Excellence, questions swirled around its viability and elevation. The new base area, the East Village, sits at 6,350 feet, 850 feet lower than the preexisting Snow Park base. Add climate change to the mix, and you have a fair question: Will the expansion have snow, locals wondered?

For Emily Summers, Deer Valley’s former director of communications, this was the line: “There's so much more than what you can see,” she says, referring to the view from the valley below. She explained further, pointing to the Park Peak network, which tops out at the same elevation as preexisting lifts in the Deer Valley arsenal.

While the lower reaches of the expansion may get thin during drier seasons like this one, Deer Valley’s sprawling snowmaking system has grown to match the new lifts. In about 45 minutes, the system can move enough water to fill an Olympic swimming pool. Miles of pipe crawl up the mountain, connecting to more than 1,000 automated snow guns. All of it serves as a hedge against uncertain weather. 

If this memorably bony ski season was a test for Deer Valley and those snow guns, they seem to have passed, with some help from the return of wintry weather in February and March. 

“We put a lot of work into pre-planning ahead of the season,” says Garrett Lang, Deer Valley’s senior director of mountain operations. “Nobody could have forecasted that we'd have as low of a snow year, but I think it really highlights the snowmaking system. We were able to overcome low snow and warm temperatures.”

There were, of course, reminders of the uncooperative atmosphere. Coated in sticky snow, the Green Monster took a laughably large amount of time to descend—a problem made worse, probably, by my aversion to ski tuning. Dirt surrounded the lowest lifts on the mountain. 

Still, top-to-bottom skiing was open and, around Park Peak, it felt like winter. To get there, all I had to do was hop on the gondola and go for a 15-minute ride. Summers’ assessment made sense. The layout didn’t feel dissimilar to Whistler, where a lift ride or two can bring you into an entirely different climate zone.

That ropeway departed from the new East Village base area, a rumble of construction work that surrounded new chairlift terminals. This was the epicenter of the expansion, and Extell had rallied the troops.

Cranes reached towards the sky, and contractor crews climbed through the skeletons of unfinished hotels. Half-built mansions dotted the landscape. Glamorous renderings show what it will eventually look like, but vision of the East Village and its eight hotels hadn’t been fully realized quite yet. 

Nor had the vision of skiing. Next winter, another new lift is set to climb up Hail Peak, a stately mound visible from the East Village. Beyond the current boundaries of the expansion, there’s South Peak, a collection of promising-looking terrain that, at some point, is set to become part of Deer Valley. The details and timeline of that addition haven’t been solidified yet, though. The promise of what the expansion could deliver in a snowier season also hovered just out of sight.

It all managed to hypnotize the ski bum in me, the one who usually prefers creaky Riblets. 

I drank in the dense network of cables and lift towers. Having seen South Peak, I was curious about the closed-door conversations that would determine the area’s future. Yet, at the same time, as my trip neared its end, I started searching for something else without realizing it. 

And then, there they were. Below the lift I was riding, I spotted a trio of telemark skiers. They had great form, but were struggling amidst the moguls. Every few turns, one of them would topple over, dust the snow off their jacket, and keep cruising downhill. That silly routine continued when I saw them again. This time, they hacked their way through some glades no one else was skiing.

Who were they, I wondered? Ski patrollers making the most of a day off? Lift operators? Given that I was at Deer Valley, they could have been hedge fund managers or royalty, too.

I won’t stress much about finding out. 

Skiing’s now a multi-billion-dollar industry with infrastructure projects that would make the ancient Egyptians and their pyramids blush. All I needed was a reminder of how this beautiful madness started. The tele skiers did the trick. 

Wherever you are, we’ve always just been fools playing in the woods.