Ski resorts throughout Utah struggled with the lack of snowfall this winter. Many opened to skiers and riders late in the season and closed early.
Deer Valley Resort was no exception, but President Todd Bennett said it was still a record-setting year.
“It was definitely a little anticlimactic, but I am so proud of what the team was able to pull off,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” April 22. “We made more snow than we've ever made. We were in the neighborhood of, gosh, probably 500 million gallons of snowmaking this year.”
The manmade snow helped the resort open more terrain than ever before, with 185 of over 200 runs getting tracks. That’s 70 more than last year.
Bennett said about 100 of those runs opened for the first time, along with seven new chairlifts. The team got creative to make some openings a reality, especially around Christmas when temperatures weren’t dropping.
“We had extra snow at the base of the Pinyon lift and the grooming and the cat team decided we're going to take one bucket load at a time, literally front-end loader on the cat, and build a run to the top of Pinyon, just to get that open for the holiday guests,” Bennett said.
The latest snowmaking technology at Deer Valley’s East Village was a big help. Bennett said the TechnoAlpin snowmaking systems push out a lot of snow. On the coldest days during the season, Deer Valley’s over 300 snow guns were putting out around 19,000 gallons of snow per minute.
Still, the resort didn’t see an increase in visitors. Previous projections showed a 20% increase year over year thanks to the expansion, but Bennett is hoping for more visitors next season.
In the meantime, he said crews are fine-tuning their operations.
“There are a few guns on Redemption Ridge that, after we skied it, we're like, you know, it's probably in the wrong spot. We want to move that gun 20 feet further to the east,” he said. “So we're making a lot of tweaks in that maybe the average guests wouldn't see, but we're spending a lot of our energy and time making sure that we're getting all of those runs dialed exactly as we want it.”
The resort is also working on summer operations.
Lift tickets for bikers and hikers are available starting April 23, and Utah Symphony concerts at the Snow Park Amphitheater begin in July.
