SKIING DOUBLE: DEER VALLEY EAST
Photo credit: Tom Zdunich
Above: About 300 acres of terrain opened this winter, but, as this photo illustrates, most of the other trails and lift lines have already been cut and roads to future home sites have been paved.
Left: Flying towers for one of the five new chairlifts installed at Deer Valley East over the summer, three of which opened this winter.
While Deer Valley is responsible for building and managing the ski infra- structure, thanks to a 2023 deal that will allow it to lease the land and brand it Deer Valley, other elements of the expan- sion, including the new East Village base area, retail space, a 68,000-square-foot rec center, and three luxury hotels, will fall under the purview of New York-based landowner/developer Extell. “We’re going to do what we do well, which is run the ski area, and they will take the lead on the village and lodging,” says Deer Valley president Todd Bennett. “We want to make sure that between our organizations, it feels like one seamless experience.” HISTORY The history between Deer Valley and what had been dubbed the “Mayflower” land after a previous owner spans decades, says Chris Cushing, principal of planning and design firm SE Group. Cushing’s father, Joe, created the original master plan for Deer Valley back in 1970. “Part of that was extending the lifts down to what’s now the East Village,” says
Cushing. “The whole notion of having a portal to Deer Valley from the Mayflower side has been there since the beginning.” Yet for a variety of reasons, not much happened for years. In the early ’70s, the owners of the Mayflower parcels—four total—weren’t interested, says Cushing. Later, some would periodically approach Deer Valley about connecting their indi- vidual pieces of land, but that would have required a lift and a skiway to get people back down the valley. “Deer Val- ley wasn’t interested in that,” he adds. “It wasn’t a ski expansion, just access to real estate.” Fast forward to 2013. Some of the parcels had changed hands, and, for the first time, the landowners were on the same page about working with Deer Val- ley to connect a new ski area. Expansion planning was underway. SE Group had drawn up an expansion plan when Extell began to purchase the parcels, eventual- ly amassing 7,000 acres total over several years and shifting direction. “It was much more land than in 2013,” says Cushing, “so we came up with a master plan for a much bigger ski
area that could either be stand-alone or an extension of Deer Valley.” Graff notes that former Deer Valley COO Bob Wheaton “had been meeting with the Mayflower folks going back 15 or 16 years.” Once Extell was in the mix, he says, “We always knew that these folks were going to be our neighbors, so prior to any operating agreement, my bosses told me to do whatever I could to help them have the best product possible. Knowing we were going to be connect- ed, we had a vested interest in helping to make it the best we could.” CONSTRUCTION Grading, clearing, blasting, and prep work has been going on since at least 2019, says Graff, but a lion’s share of the on-hill work was done in 2024: power, infrastructure, water, sewer, and more. Because of the massive scale of the job, Deer Valley tapped contractors from the oil and gas industry who worked at Mach speed to accommodate the expe- dited timeframe. “The reality is this project is so big, most of our existing contractors didn’t have the scope to do
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