Deer Valley Planning Four-Stage Gondola System, Parking Revamp to Complement Enormous Expansion

Deer Valley’s Snow Park base area will see a revamp to focus less on parking, with a new gondola providing access to lots in a new area of the resort.

Deer Valley’s massive 182% terrain expansion isn’t the only major project on the resort’s horizon. The skier-only resort recently announced a collaborative partnership with Park City Municipal to shift traffic away from the resort’s popular Snow Park base, with several lift, parking, and base area impacts resulting from the project.

As part of this project, the resort plans to completely redesign its Snow Park base into a pedestrian-oriented base village, with several new hotels, restaurants, and condos. Deer Valley intends to shrink the number of Snow Park parking spaces by approximately 10-15%, but to make up for this, the resort plans a new base portal on US 40—near the bottom of the current Jordanelle base—with an additional 1,200 parking spaces.

Perhaps most importantly, to link the Snow Park base with this new parking portal, Deer Valley plans to implement a four-stage gondola system covering over five miles. Rather than directly transporting guests between the two bases, this system will service a new upper mountain area—specifically, the proposed Park Peak expansion—along the way. Two stages of this gondola route will run mostly along already existing terrain, connecting the Snow Park base with the top of Park Peak; the other two stages will run from Park Peak to the new access portal, involving a slightly modified line for a 10-passenger gondola already proposed in Deer Valley’s August expansion announcement. The system would comprise two separate two-stage gondolas, with the Park Peak summit providing the transfer point.

This project still needs to receive full approval from the Park City City Council, but should it move forward, the full suite of upgrades will likely take the rest of the decade, with the rest of Deer Valley’s expansion initiatives taking precedence. Everything is expected to be done by the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

The full suite of changes can be found here.

A terrain map showing the full Deer Valley expansion plan, with the proposed four-stage gondola system highlighted in red.

Our Take

Since so much of this project is expected to be finished after Deer Valley nearly triples its terrain footprint, it’s hard to estimate exactly the impact this project will have. But regardless, it’s clear this development is going to heavily incentivize parking at the new Jordanelle portal, rather than driving through downtown Park City to get to Snow Park.

Gondola System Impacts

The most standout facet about this proposed gondola system is just how complex it is both in design and route—the proposed lift would have four different stages across over five miles, and rather than providing a direct link between the Jordanelle portal and the Snow Park base, it would transport guests by way of the resort summit.

Given that Deer Valley mentions that linking the Snow Park base with the new Jordanelle portal is a critical goal of this new gondola system, it’s interesting to see how out of the way it is in providing that link. With an estimated ride time of 25 minutes from base to base, the four-stage ride doesn’t seem like a desirable transportation option to get between these two areas—especially with some parking still existing at the Snow Park base. Rather, it seems like this gondola system—which, as proposed, will be two separate lifts meeting at the top—will most effectively function as comfortable base-to-summit transportation for skiers at Deer Valley.

This figure shows a rendering of the new Snow Park base village. The developments on the bottom right will take the place of parking lots.

Source: Deer Valley Expanded Excellence

Parking Impacts

As far as Deer Valley’s overall mountain experience, deliberately shifting parking over to the new US 40 Jordanelle portal may be somewhat of a gamble—we don’t know whether guests will like the terrain near the new parking lots, whether these low-elevation slopes will be reliable, or how long it will reasonably take to get to other parts of the mountain. But it’s nearly impossible to avoid the congestion of downtown Park City with the current Snow Park base, so by rerouting resort traffic to US 40, Deer Valley should provide extremely important relief here. Deer Valley chooses to limit ticket sales and pass reservations on a daily basis, so the overall impact will likely also depend on how much capacity the resort chooses to add with its expanded footprint.

Considering a ski trip to Deer Valley this year—before its big changes come through? Check out our full Utah ski resort rankings, as well as our comprehensive Deer Valley mountain review. You can also check out our Deer Valley review in video form below.