something this large,” says Graff. “Snow- making alone will require putting in 40 miles of pipe in two years.” Snowmaking. It was exciting to see, he says. “What they accomplished this summer in terms of snowmaking alone, I’ve never seen anything like it. They can put in five times as much snowmaking because of their equipment, like massive trenching machines that can go through solid rock, and weld hundreds of feet of pipe together.” All told, the resort will add 615 acres of all-new, state-of-the-art snowmaking with an anticipated capacity of around 10,000 gallons per minute. This includes about 1,200 HKD sticks and 155 Tech- noAlpin fans, all fully automated. Though TechnoAlpin guns are tra- ditionally yellow, these are Deer Valley green. “We got them painted green,” says Graff. “You can do that when you buy 155 of them.” The 40 miles of new pipe—“a stag- gering number,” he notes—will be installed over two years, bringing total snowmaking pipe with the existing resort system to about 70 miles. The resort is installing coated steel pipe for water and HDPE for air lines. Deer Valley East will be a standalone snowmaking system with interfaces to the existing resort. The new snowmak- ing system won’t be online until 2025- 26, but this season about 100 of the HKD sticks will be integrated into Deer
Valley’s existing snowmaking system, along with 238 other HKD guns that were installed last winter on Deer Valley East terrain. “For someone like me in mountain operations who’s been doing this my whole life, what an opportunity,” says Graff. “The scale of everything going in, like a snowmaking system that has 10,000-gallon-per-minute pumping capacity, it’s all just staggering. When we combine the existing Deer Valley with our expansion, we will have 50 million gallons of capacity in our (three snow- making) ponds and will be able to blow 20,000 gallons a minute.” Lift infrastructure. The ski runs for Phase 1 had largely been built by November and lift alignments mostly set, says Cushing. Phases 1A and 1B of the expansion call for nine or 10 lifts by the 2025-26 season, with an undetermined timeframe on the final six. All will be Doppelmayr. Up and running for 2024-25 are the Keetley Express, Aurora, and Hoodoo Express lifts, which all originate from the new East Village. Keetley, a D-Line six- pack bubble with heated seats—its name a mining reference, like many elements at Deer Valley—will provide the first of four access points to the original resort and will take riders to the Sultan Lift at Deer Valley. Hoodoo is a Uni-G detach- able quad, which serves the East Village beginner area, and Aurora is a fixed-grip
quad with a loading conveyor.
In 2025-26, Phase 1B will add a flag- ship East Village gondola, a 10-passen- ger D-Line; the Pinion Express, a D-Line detachable six-pack; the Galena express, a D-Line quad; and several more Uni-G quads. The gondola will provide a two- stage connection from the East Village to Park Peak in 2025 and will eventually be a four-stage, connecting to the Snow Park side of Deer Valley. Cushing says new lift technology has allowed more terrain to be served with fewer, longer, and more efficient lifts. “The expansion has 16 lifts; Deer Valley has 21 lifts” for about 2,000 acres of ter- rain, he says. “The lift alignment has been configured so that they can serve as much terrain as possible and limit initial costs.” Teams will take a wait-and-see approach on the remaining six lifts, says Graff. “Like any resort’s master plan, some lifts are going to be capacity dependent. We will gauge how skier vis- its increase after the first 10 lifts are in, then see what happens.” Likewise with some of the terrain. Plans for an 800-acre area of expert ter- rain called South Peak, which will even- tually have two lifts, are undetermined, but it will not be developed by 2025. » DEER VALLEY EAST: BY THE NUMBERS Once the entire expansion is complete, which is still TBD at this time, it will add the following to Deer Valley’s current operation: SKIABLE ACRES: 3,700 TRAILS: 135 LIFTS: 16 SNOW GUNS: 1,200 STICKS, 155 FANS SNOWMAKING PIPE: 40 MILES (211,200 FEET) SNOWMAKING ACRES: 615 PUMPING CAPACITY: 10,000 GPM SNOWMAKING WATER STORAGE: 10 MILLION GALLONS SNOWCATS FOR 2024-25: 4 PARKING SPACES: 1,200 STAFF: 1,500 (700 IN MOUNTAIN OPS)
Above: Two of the three new lifts out of the base area serve beginner terrain, while the Keetley Express (left terminal) serves as the first connector to Deer Valley’s existing terrain.
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