The Ambitious Plan to Merge Utah’s Major Ski Resorts—And How It Shaped Today’s Mountains
Background
When it comes to planning an American ski trip, Utah is one of the top choices for a bucket-list vacation. But what if we told you it could have also had the largest skiable footprint in North America—by almost double the size of the next competitor?
That’s right, within the not-so-distant past, plans circulated to combine nearly every major ski resort in the state across one gigantic footprint. And even today, this plan is much closer to achieving its goals than one might expect. So how exactly would this insane Utah mega-resort come to fruition, what would need to be done to fully complete it, and how are its ripple effects still shaping Utah’s ski scene today? Let’s jump right into it.
The boundary between Deer Valley and Park City is little more than a rope.
History of Utah’s Ski Resorts and Early Connections
Before we jump into the blueprints of Utah’s mega-resort plan, we first have to discuss how so many ski resorts got built in such close proximity to one another in the first place.
The ski areas of the central Wasatch developed in remarkable proximity thanks to the range’s unique geography and Utah’s mid-20th-century skiing boom. In Little Cottonwood Canyon and Big Cottonwood Canyon, two adjacent canyons just east of Salt Lake City, developers utilized primitive right-of-ways originally set up for mining to establish four resorts: first, Alta and Brighton at the terminus of each canyon in the 1930s, followed by Solitude below Brighton in the late 1950s, and then Snowbird adjacent to Alta in the early 1970s.
Over the ridge on the “Wasatch Back” above Park City, three more ski resorts were developed as well: Park City Ski Area (originally Treasure Mountain), Deer Valley, and Canyons (originally Park West). Wait, three more, not two? Many of you probably know what we’re talking about, but for the rest of you, more on that later.
By the 1980s, seven distinct ski areas operated within only a few geographical miles of one another, separated mainly by mountain ridges and canyon boundaries. This clustering was partly coincidental—each resort originated independently, often on historic mining land—but it was also due to the exceptional snow accumulation exclusive to one very small silver of a singular mountain range in the state. Either way, it created an unusual concentration of ski terrain.
Early on, these neighboring resorts began to flirt with interconnection on a smaller scale. In the 1982-83 season, Solitude opened a trail link to Brighton via the “SolBright” trail, allowing skiers and riders to traverse between the two Big Cottonwood resorts. This was officially on both resort trail maps by 1987, and by 2013, this was accompanied by a joint ticket (called the “Big Cottonwood Pass”) that gave access to both mountains’ combined 2,100 acres and 15 lifts.
The entrance to the SolBright trail from the Brighton side, which connects the resort to nearby Solitude.
Meanwhile in Little Cottonwood, Alta and Snowbird were located adjacent at a high ridge, with their boundaries directly bordering one another—and unofficially allowing for skiing between both resorts—as early as the 1980s. But by 2001, they formed a formal partnership that coincided with the opening of Snowbird’s Mineral Basin backside, installing a gate near Snowbird’s Baldy Express chairlift that enabled skiers to move freely between the two resorts. And the key word there is skiers, because Alta did not allow snowboarders, a policy we’ll roll back to later.
By 1998, in preparation for the 2002 Olympic Games, Park City and Deer Valley both debuted substantial lift-served terrain expansions that put parts of their boundaries directly next to one another—and although the resorts never opened an official link, one could now theoretically just duck the rope to go from Park City to Deer Valley, or vice-versa. As a result, the Utah ski world ended up in a place where six of its resorts were bordered by nothing more than a rope line. So if that could happen, why not link them all?
Indeed, the dream of connecting multiple Utah ski areas is not new. A 1980s proposal envisioned linking Park City with Brighton, Solitude, Alta, and Snowbird. However, the proposal excluded Park West, which later became Canyons, because it wasn’t considered destination-grade at the time, as well as Deer Valley, which was (and still is) the newest destination ski resort in the United States, having only opened in 1981. And ultimately, the plan was stalled amidst governmental planning concerns.
But by the 2010s, with the borders of these resorts closer than ever and significant capital investments achieved in large part thanks to the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, momentum for a modern interconnect returned in a new form.
Utah resorts Alta and Snowbird were connected in 2001, when Snowbird opened an expansion that nudged the boundary with Alta and allowed skiers to traverse between the resorts.
SkiLink
The first true action for an interconnect attempt didn’t come from the whole Wasatch ski industry, but rather from two specific resorts. In 2011, Talisker Corp., which owned Canyons at the time, unveiled a plan for an 8,000-foot gondola directly linking Canyons on the Park City side to Solitude in Big Cottonwood Canyon. This particular link was especially enticing because, then as now, no winter road existed directly from the Park City area to the Cottonwoods. Installing this gondola would have turned an out-of-the-way, 45-mile drive between the two sectors into a direct, 11-minute gondola ride between the two mountains, and proponents argued it would have reduced traffic in both resort areas.
However, the big sticking point was land ownership; since the gondola would have crossed 30 acres of public land owned by the U.S. Forest Service, it would have normally had to go through a lengthy environmental approval process to get the green light. But to get around that, the project stakeholders sought a sale of 30 acres of land to bypass those approvals. The land sale proposal got support in Congress, with local Utah representatives and senators introducing federal legislation to move it forward.
But that land sale plan proved to be extremely controversial. Local Salt Lake City officials and even the U.S. Forest Service itself raised alarms over the precedent that sidestepping environmental review through federal legislation would set. Dozens of environmental groups also argued it would fragment vital watershed and backcountry terrain (both of these arguments would become very relevant in future interconnect talks).
The SkiLink plan proposed a gondola connecting the upper part of Canyons with the base of Solitude.
In addition, one could argue the layout of the proposed SkiLink gondola wasn’t all that practical. While the Solitude terminal would have been built at the Eagle Express, which is right at the base of the resort, the Canyons terminal would have been located all the way at the far end of the ski area between the Dreamscape and Daybreak lifts, about as far from the Canyons base village as one could get. And due to the incongruent lift layout at Canyons, getting to said gondola would have taken four lifts from the nearest parking lot, and at least two to get back. As a result, if you wanted to ski or ride specifically at Solitude or on the front side of Canyons, you wouldn’t have saved all that much time versus just driving there and back.
Ultimately, the swift backlash to SkiLink seemed to work: numerous community stakeholders launched campaigns opposing the project, and by 2013, the public land sale legislation had stalled in Congress. Facing all of these issues—as well as a key ownership change on the part of Canyons we will revisit later—Canyons and Solitude quietly shelved the SkiLink project.
Yet the idea of linking Utah’s ski resorts was far from dead. Within less than a year, the state’s ski resorts took the learnings from SkiLink to team up with the Ski Utah tourism board to promote a new proposal, and this time, it was backed by all of the resort operators in the Wasatch region.
ONE Wasatch: An Ambitious Plan to Link Seven Resorts
In March 2014, Ski Utah and representatives of all seven central Wasatch resorts held a news conference to unveil ONE Wasatch, a concept to connect the ski areas via a series of new chairlifts and runs. Unlike earlier speculative ideas, this proposal had the explicit support of each resort’s management, from independent areas like Alta, Snowbird, Solitude, and Deer Valley to corporate-managed resorts like Canyons (Vail Resorts), Brighton (Boyne Resorts), and Park City (POWDR Corp.). The scale would have been extraordinary: over 18,000 acres of skiable terrain served by more than 100 lifts and 750 runs, and a footprint where a single passholder could cross from Little Cottonwood to Park City in one continuous journey. If achieved, it would dwarf the next largest resort in North America, Whistler Blackcomb, by a magnitude of 120%, and it would have been bigger than all but a few of the continuous linked ski regions in Europe.
ONE Wasatch Logo
Now’s a good time to talk about the economic reasons why all these resorts got on board with the ONE Wasatch plan, and why Ski Utah pushed so heavily for it. By the early 2010s, destinations like Colorado’s Summit County and Canada’s Whistler Blackcomb had capitalized on their scale and interconnection. And while Utah’s resorts offered world-class snow and proximity to a major airport, the state’s tourism board believed they often lost multi-day vacationers to competitors who could advertise 5,000 acres on one ticket, especially when their resorts still competed largely as individual properties. According to the Wasatch Backcountry Alliance after they received a VIP tour of the terrain, the state’s ski areas had a lot of unoccupied hotel space, and they felt they could push that much more effectively with a gigantic skiable footprint to advertise—a footprint that ONE Wasatch promised to bring about. So if nothing else, these resorts were on board with the plan for the sake of the sheer marketing power.
The Special Use Permit (SUP) granted to Alta by the US Forest Service
Crucially, ONE Wasatch was advanced only as a conceptual framework, not a formal development proposal; this was a deliberate contrast to SkiLink, which many argued lost credibility due to its perceived haste and the political maneuvering involved. In addition, while some of the proposed projects would take place on public land, all of this land was already within the resorts’ Special Use Permit area, meaning no land swaps would be required, and the projects could be developed subject to the Forest Service’s approval.
Specific lift alignments and timelines were not fixed, but the proposal outlined four key connection steps needed to realize the interconnect:
Connect Little Cottonwood Canyon to Big Cottonwood Canyon: This would likely mean building lifts or gondolas between Alta/Snowbird and Solitude/Brighton over the ridgeline separating Little and Big Cottonwood. The favored location was in the Grizzly Gulch area adjacent to Alta, linking to Solitude’s terrain near Honeycomb Canyon. Notably, the proposed Honeycomb lift on the Solitude side would have added lift service to the extreme Fantasy Ridge area for the first time, and with both the Grizzly and Honeycomb chairlifts proposed to terminate at the top of that ridge, there would not only be substantially easier access to that area, but also a new travel route that would likely bring significant traffic.
Connect Big Cottonwood Canyon to the Park City area: The proposal envisioned a connection from Brighton or Solitude through the Guardsman Pass area into the Park City resorts, either Park City itself or Deer Valley. The favored scenario had two lifts connecting in the pass itself, with one extending up to Clayton Peak near Brighton, and the other one reaching the Jupiter area of Park City. Notably, the Brighton lift would end well to the skiers’ right of the current boundary, so some sort of terrain expansion would be necessary.
Link Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons: ONE Wasatch called for establishing a physical connection between Park City and Canyons, which could be done with one lift or gondola. The plan here suggested a gondola from the top of Canyons’ Iron Mountain across Pine Cone Ridge into Park City’s Thayne’s Canyon, with the terminus on the Park City side planned to be next to the King Con lift. The gondola would have a mid-station allowing guests to ski or ride some of the expert Pine Cone Ridge terrain into Park City or mellower trails into Canyons. Notably, the direct lift connection between Canyons and Solitude from SkiLink was abandoned as part of this plan.
“Drop the rope” between Deer Valley and Park City Mountain: Unlike the other gaps, Deer Valley and Park City already share a boundary at Empire Canyon. The phrase “drop the rope” meant simply removing the boundary barrier so that skiers could cross between Deer Valley’s Empire area and Park City’s McConkey’s zone.
On paper, achieving at least the first three of these four steps may have sounded like a substantial undertaking. But thanks to how close the resorts already were to one another, ONE Wasatch would have only required building five or six new lifts and could be done in a single summer construction season at a cost of around $20-30 million. Now that’s not cheap, but if the costs were shared across all seven resorts, it wouldn’t have been all that much more than a single new high-speed lift.
If fully realized, ONE Wasatch would have resulted in the largest ski resort in North America by a significant margin.
Resort Tensions and Open Questions
At the 2014 rollout, the major resort operators expressed enthusiasm for the concept. Behind the public optimism, however, each resort also had business interests to protect, and not all were equally invested. First off, Park City Mountain’s situation in 2014 was, to put it lightly, complex. Vail Resorts had pulled off a hostile takeover of the lease to much of the land under the resort, starting a legal battle that cast uncertainty on the resort’s ownership, and, consequently, any immediate collaboration. That was a whirlwind of a legal battle that’s worth discussing in its own right in another piece, but in short, it was resolved later in 2014 when Vail took over Park City.
But even after that, there were other clear tensions and open questions. One was how to integrate different ticketing and pricing models. The resorts ranged from pricey, skier-only Deer Valley to more mass-market areas like Brighton and Solitude; Park City and Canyons were on the Epic Pass (now that both were owned by Vail Resorts), while Alta was on the two-day Mountain Collective Pass (the Ikon Pass didn’t exist yet). Also, if certain resorts benefited more from the interconnected skier traffic, how would the revenue be split? These were business conflicts largely left undefined in the concept phase.
Additionally, the ski-only policies at Alta and Deer Valley stood out as a significant policy issue. Both resorts were and still are among the only three in North America that prohibit snowboarders (the third is Vermont’s Mad River Glen). In a fully interconnected Wasatch, a snowboarder attempting to ride from Snowbird to Solitude would hit a literal roadblock at Alta; they could technically snowboard down Alta’s slopes because they are on public land, but Alta would not let them board a lift (no pun intended) to carry on. The same issue would exist at Deer Valley’s border, although at least in that resort’s case, it was planned to be at the edge of the ONE Wasatch footprint and therefore wouldn’t be in the middle of a route between two other mountains. This raised questions about how a “one pass” system would accommodate guests who snowboard. At least in the planning phase, the assumption seemed to be that snowboarders might be shuttled around Alta to get between Snowbird and the new Solitude lift if needed, and that the novelty of a giant interconnected ski area could outweigh this hurdle.
Due to Alta’s skier only policy, a snowboarder traversing ONE Wasatch would be unable to use Alta’s lifts to get to Snowbird from the other resorts, or vice versa.
Public Opposition and ONE Wasatch Stalls
But these logistical hurdles weren’t even close to the biggest roadblock for the ONE Wasatch plan. As soon as the mega project was floated, it encountered vocal opposition from environmental and backcountry groups, alongside skepticism from some local officials and citizens. The central issue: those “few lifts” needed to link the resorts would cross high-altitude lands that had never before been developed for skiing, including prime backcountry skiing and riding areas that many local Utahns cherished. The Wasatch Backcountry Alliance and Save Our Canyons led the charge against the interconnect, arguing it would effectively privatize or restrict access to favorable backcountry terrain. Jamie Kent, president of the Backcountry Alliance, brought up a critical point: backcountry skiing in Utah had been growing in popularity even as resort skier numbers had plateaued at the time. Other controversy surrounded what would happen to Park City’s Pine Cone Ridge and Solitude’s Fantasy Ridge if the project went forward; these were serious expert-only terrain areas that were previously reserved for hiking, and while adding lift service to these areas would provide a much more convenient expert experience, some could argue it might have also made these areas too easy to reach and more quickly skied out.
Environmental and watershed impacts were another major worry. There were a number of issues raised, but the biggest one was that high Wasatch is the source of a substantial amount of Salt Lake City’s drinking water, and much of the land between the resorts lies on protected watershed and U.S. Forest Service property. In fact, this is a major reason why dogs are banned from the canyons, with dog waste being a serious risk to the water supply. Salt Lake City officials raised alarms that further resort development could threaten water quality for hundreds of thousands of residents, with the director of public utilities at the time suggesting that even if these projects just proposed a handful of lifts on the surface, that would only be the tip of the iceberg, and the additional skier traffic would bring about the need for more on-mountain facilities with larger environmental consequences.
Solitude’s Fantasy Ridge, an experts’ terrain zone only accessible by hiking, was an area that locals argued would be negatively affected by ONE Wasatch infrastructure.
Speaking of additional skier traffic, perhaps the biggest worry among the local population was overcrowding. Many argued that an 18,000-acre interconnect would attract so many visitors that it would backfire, leading to unmanageable lift lines and tracked out snow. This would be a huge negative side effect, especially in the Cottonwoods, which were and still are known for having the best snow in the country. And ultimately, local Utah skiers and riders didn’t want to attract more tourism revenue at the expense of the very essence of their resorts.
Faced with all of this public opposition, state and local policymakers stepped in as mediators and planners of a potential ONE Wasatch. An initiative known as the Mountain Accord was launched to hammer out a comprehensive economic plan for the central Wasatch, including transportation, environment, and perhaps most importantly, recreation. While ONE Wasatch was a proposal on the table, it became clear that with so much pushback, compromise would be needed. The resorts wanted to attract more visitors, but to locals and environmental activists, the costs of an interconnect were too high.
In July 2015, Mountain Accord participants, including Ski Utah and the resorts, reached a landmark conceptual compromise that essentially tabled much of the interconnect in favor of conservation and more realistic development opportunities. The Accord had Utah’s Cottonwoods ski resorts agree in principle to forgo future expansions beyond their existing boundaries, with limited exceptions, in exchange for land swaps granting new development rights at their base areas. In practice, those exchanges were never finalized: the federal appraisal process proved prohibitively expensive, and by 2018, the resorts had reverted to the status quo. But the core outcome was clear: there was now a public commitment to abandon the interconnect concept, even if the legal mechanics later unraveled.
Overcrowded slopes and longer lift lines were a major concern for Utah locals opposing ONE Wasatch.
What Did Happen: Park City & Canyons Join Forces
But while the Cottonwoods sections of the interconnect failed to materialize, one significant piece of it did get built—albeit under significantly different circumstances. In 2015, Vail Resorts completed the merger of Park City Mountain and Canyons into a single unified ski resort, now known simply as Park City. Vail had acquired Park City Mountain in 2014 and already operated Canyons (under a lease from Talisker), so the company moved quickly to connect the two properties. In the summer of 2015, they installed the eight-passenger Quicksilver Gondola, stretching 1.5 miles over Pine Cone Ridge to link Park City Mountain’s terrain with Canyons’ Iron Mountain area. The new gondola followed the original ONE Wasatch plan very closely, with essentially the same terminal and mid-station on the Canyons side, but rather than terminating at the King Con lift at the Park City side, the final construction had the new gondola span over Thayne’s Canyon and end closer to the heart of the resort near the Silverlode lift.
By December 2015, the Quicksilver lift was complete, and the combined Park City ski resort became the largest ski area in the United States, boasting over 7,300 acres of terrain, 340 trails and 41 lifts on one ticket. This $50 million project was way over-budget from the original concept, but it effectively accomplished step 3 of the ONE Wasatch vision (the Park City/Canyons connection) on a standalone basis, and it gave Utah’s tourism board the gigantic skiable footprint it had hoped to use to attract people in the first place.
But while it created the largest resort in the United States on paper, the practical experience left a lot to be desired. The Quicksilver Gondola is about as far from the Canyons base as one can get within that side of the resort, and it's quite a ways away from the Park City base area too. At launch, it required riding five separate lifts to travel from the Park City base to the Canyons base, and the same in reverse, often taking more than half an hour under ideal conditions with no lines. For visitors on the wrong side, missing a lift connection late in the day meant a frustrating bus ride back to their car. The Over and Out lift, added in 2019, improved the connection slightly by trimming the Park City-to-Canyons route to four lifts, but navigation between the two mountains still feels disjointed.
Even today, some resorts that are actually separate entities, including the aforementioned Alta/Snowbird and Brighton/Solitude, still offer better connections than the merged Park City setup. In effect, the resort achieved the really strong marketing plug that ONE Wasatch once strived for, but in the gimmicky way that many critics of that original interconnect plan expected.
The Quicksilver Gondola, which spans between Park City and the Canyons and allows the two resort sides to operate as one massive connected resort.
Could ONE Wasatch Ever Be Revived?
Will the full interconnect ever be revived? At least for now, ONE Wasatch hasn’t officially been cancelled, but neither the business nor political will seems to exist to revive it. Even though the Cottonwoods portion of the project would only take a few chairlifts, it would take a lot of political blowback to renege on the conservation promises from the 2015 Mountain Accord, even if the land swaps never happened.
But perhaps more importantly, within only a handful of seasons of the interconnect being shelved, a significant factor reshaped the Utah ski scene: the rise of multi-resort mega passes such as Epic and Ikon. Five Wasatch ski resorts became members of some flavor of the Ikon Pass, including Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, Solitude, and Deer Valley, and while the now-combined Park City/Canyons footprint is the only Epic Pass resort in Utah, it’s still gigantic enough to attract hordes of skiers and riders in its own right. As a result, even though the resorts are not physically connected, Utah visitors can now ski or ride thousands of acres of terrain across a single week on the same pass. The visitation that ONE Wasatch once promised through physical connection has now effectively been delivered by the Epic and Ikon product designs.
This shift helps explain how even though Park City and Deer Valley are still only a single rope drop apart, they no longer see an interconnect as necessary—but for those two resorts, this doesn’t tell the whole story. Park City is already the biggest ski resort in the United States, but while Deer Valley was a mid-sized resort until just recently, it’s actually in the process of debuting a ginormous terrain expansion—which, notably, is on private land and therefore not subject to the same restrictions as the incomplete parts of the interconnect. If its claims are to be believed, the multi-year expansion project will give Deer Valley over 5,700 acres of skiable terrain, delivering a larger skiable footprint than all but three other ski resorts in North America. As a result, both Park City and Deer Valley can now sell consumers on their raw footprint size without the need to team up with anyone else.
This all being said, it’s important to note that while these factors have been a boon for Utah’s winter tourism that have all but made the interconnect economics obsolete, they’ve also brought the commercialization that many locals feared from the original interconnect plan. With so many people attracted to the weeklong or unlimited access to huge swaths of terrain at relatively affordable prices, Utah’s ski resorts have seen a serious string of consequences, including access road traffic jams, overcrowded slopes, and fed up workforces. In many ways, the multi-pass era is the spiritual successor to ONE Wasatch, but not in the way that the local Utah winter sports goer would have ever wanted. At least for environmentalists, it’s occurred in a way that’s brought minimal disturbance to public land.
Deer Valley is in the midst of a multi-year expansion that includes thousands of acres of terrain and many new lifts, including the Keetley Express bubble chairlift pictured above.
The Utah Interconnect That Does Exist Today
But wait a second… is the Wasatch interconnect really dead? Well, even though you can’t ride a lift directly between the Wasatch Canyons, it is possible for adventurous skiers to link multiple Utah resorts in a day by other means. For decades, Ski Utah has operated the Interconnect Tour, a guided backcountry ski tour that allows strong skiers to touch six resorts in one epic day (as one might pessimistically expect, snowboarders are not allowed due to Alta and Deer Valley’s restrictions). The tour starts either at Deer Valley or Snowbird and, through a series of lift rides, traverses, hikes, and off-piste descents, visits Park City, Solitude, Brighton, and Alta, and ends at Snowbird (or it goes the other way around and ends at Deer Valley). Participants cover roughly 25 miles and thousands of vertical feet, often with little-touched lines of snow in between resorts, right in the places where those interconnect lifts could have existed.
Final Thoughts
So no, Utah’s “ONE Wasatch” plan never officially reached completion. But way more of the program’s goals were achieved than the casual observer would ever assume. One key resort connection between Park City and Canyons was constructed, but perhaps more importantly, the multi-resort access structure through Ikon, and, to a lesser extent, Epic, has driven the destination-grade demand that those who pushed for the interconnect initially designed the program to achieve. But that same achievement of that goal has come with a substantial heaping of the side effects that locals feared, and even the more locally-oriented Cottonwoods resorts like Solitude and Brighton are seeing an influx of tourists these days. Ultimately, the plan to combine the Utah ski resorts is most fascinating to us not because it was a crazy idea, but because it actually worked—even though it was never completely finished.
What do you think of the interconnect concept? Could it ever really work? Let us know in the comments below.
