The surface parking lots at Deer Valley’s Snow Park base are home to the resort’s future. The ski area is proposing to build a new ski-in ski-out village on the land with hotels, restaurants, and event space.
Under Deer Valley’s plan, parking and the existing road near the base drop-off will be moved underground, to allow space for development.
Jeff Kovel with Skylab Architecture, which is helping Deer Valley on the project, said they’re aiming to make the village a vibrant area.
“We’ve been really working hard to figure out how do you do a project that’s that large, but have it feel really small, have it feel intimate,” Kovel said. “Really looking to kind of the scale of European villages in terms of how those places feel like they’re pedestrian scale, the automobile usually isn’t really present. There’s a great kind of discovery that takes place as you walk through the village.”
Fellow consultant Michael Demkowicz with Park City-based Alliance Engineering said Deer Valley’s traffic circulation plan includes an extra shared mobility lane along the Deer Valley Drive loop in Snow Park.
“In the wintertime, it’s a bus lane, cars will stay out of it,” Demkowicz said. “It gives the buses priority, an opportunity to pass the cars. And in the summertime, we would use that as a bike lane. So we don’t anticipate the buses necessarily using that lane during normal summer operations. Now events, concerts, things like that, that’s where we would probably need to share that with the buses as well.”
Other improvements mentioned on Monday include an expansion of the Snow Park Lodge and a new skier services building at the base.
Around 200 people attended the open house presentation, which included new 3D renderings of the village (posted below).
Deer Lake Village resident Peter Kidd was opposed to the resort’s previous plan, which didn’t involve preserving the traffic circulation at the base. Kidd said he and his neighbors are satisfied with the recent changes.
“I was never ever against the project,” Kidd said. “I was against them taking public land and taking away public access for that road. That was our biggest opposition… My opinion is that they finally saw the light in that there was a lot of opposition.”
Deer Valley is planning four more open houses about the project later this year. The next one will be in August and will focus on construction impacts.
The resort has set a target to break ground on the new village next spring, but first it needs government approval. A date has not been set for the Park City Planning Commission to review the proposal.
