How Utah's Ski Resorts Are Winning the Battle Against Climate Change
Climate change is an existential threat to the future of skiing, but Utah’s legendary ski resorts are betting they’ll survive.
Utah’s Sundance Mountain Resort.
Source: Sundance Mountain Resort
It’s 55F and sunny as I slide into the black-and-green seats of Deer Valley Resort’s new Keetley Express chairlift. It’s mid-March—at least a month before barren earth will reappear through the snowpack in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. But as the lift pulls higher toward Keetley Point, a phalanx of construction crews comes into focus. Piercing the snow are more than three dozen excavators, diggers and forklifts, the landscape newly dotted with rebar and concrete. Deer Valley’s multibillion-dollar transformation, I see, is officially underway.
By the time the lifts start spinning again this winter, those crews will have built 10 chairlifts and 2,300 acres of new ski terrain, more than doubling the size of a resort that already has plenty of luxury hotels, high-end shops and swanky restaurants. And that’s just the start. In the next several years, Deer Valley will have hundreds of additional homes, an on-mountain day lodge, 8 hotels, 42 retail shops, 32 restaurants and 7 cafes. It’s the largest ski-area expansion in US history.