SKIING DOUBLE: DEER VALLEY EAST
Above: Trail clearing began in 2019, following a design by SE Group, which also designed the original Deer Valley terrain, so the ski experience transitions naturally from existing to new terrain.
Left: The top terminal of one of three new lifts that opened this winter.
Grooming. As with the lifts, groom- ing will be approached as a roll-out. Graff says four machines were purchased to cover the expanded terrain this year, bringing the trail-grooming fleet to 21 in addition to three winches, one work cat with a basket, and a handful of loan- ers, including some cabin cats, to demo from Prinoth and PistenBully—a benefit of buying so much hardware, says Graff. Deer Valley has traditionally been a Prinoth mountain, says Graff, but now has a mixed fleet after it purchased its first PistenBullys a few years ago. “I think we have almost every cat model that both manufacturers make.” This year, groomers will be out in those machines doing “real-world” test- ing to see what sticks. “We are taking this opportunity of massive growth to eval- uate how we do things,” says Graff. “We are going to look at everything available and what’s going to work the best for us.” The resort will also utilize SNOWsat technology. This fall, it collected fly-over LiDAR imaging of the existing resort and portions of the expansion, which was loaded into five snowcats this season to start collecting data. Graff hopes it will
help reconcile differences of opinions between groomers and snowmakers as well as provide a level of efficiency and savings. “I’m very optimistic that we can be a lot more efficient with our snow- making and grooming if operators can get the data about the depths of snow in front of them,” he says. “Having some real data to inform those decisions will be really helpful.” Parking. Another important, albeit less dramatic, part of the expansion is 1,200 new parking spaces, with about 500 coming online this season. All told, they will nearly double Deer Valley’s existing 1,400-space parking capacity (1,700 with street parking), located at the Snow Park base area. The parking will provide visitors another entry point and divert skier traf- fic away from often-congested Park City. “You can come from Salt Lake, Heber, the airport, and parts of Midway to get to the Deer Valley East Village and you won’t hit a stoplight,” says Bennett. Though not part of Deer Valley’s workload, SE Group is also on the team for Extell’s East Village base area devel- opment and worked with its residential
planning team to design ski access from residential lots. The resort village is being developed by Extell, though Deer Valley will have a skier services building there. MIDA. Another aspect of the expan- sion is the partnership between Extell and Utah’s Military Installation Devel- opment Authority (MIDA), in which service members can receive discounted room rates at the new East Village lux- ury Grand Hyatt Deer Valley. While the partnership is between MIDA and Extell, Deer Valley is offering discounted tick- ets, rentals, and lessons to support these hotel bookings as a package deal. OPERATIONS AND STAFFING When the expansion is fully up and run- ning, an estimated 1,500 additional staff will be required during the height of win- ter. Deer Valley employed about 3,000 staff total last year. Mountain ops alone is estimated to double in size, from 700 to 1,400 employees, says Graff. Growth opportunities. “Hiring that many new people could dilute your cul- ture, so we’re focusing on taking the cur- rent leadership and growing them,” he says. For mountain ops, this means set-
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