Park City

The largest ski area in the United States

Park City is a small city in Utah’s Wasatch Back, mostly within Summit County with a corner reaching into Wasatch County, about 51 km south-east of downtown Salt Lake City along Interstate 80. Its permanent population was 8,396 at the 2020 census, but for much of the year visitors comfortably outnumber residents. The mining that built the town shut down, the population fell, and the recovery came through tourism in the 1980s and 1990s. Today the city has two major ski resorts, Deer Valley and Park City Mountain, plus Woodward Park City, a smaller action-sports training centre.

The skiing

The figures on this page are for Park City Mountain, which became the largest ski area in the United States when Park City and Canyons merged in 2015. Wikipedia counts 17 slopes, 14 bowls, 300 trails and 35 km of lifts; in our data that comes to 250 km of pistes, 41 lifts and six terrain parks. The breakdown is what matters. Only 20 km is graded easy, against 125 km intermediate and 105 km expert, so this is a mountain weighted firmly towards confident skiers, and the expert share, with its bowls, is unusually large for an area of this size. Beginners are looked after, but they will be using a small fraction of the terrain.

Lifts run from a base at 2,080 m to a top station at 3,049 m, a vertical of 969 m, and the whole area sits at an altitude that would count as very high in the Alps. That helps snow reliability, and the season runs from November to April. Wikipedia adds a caveat worth knowing: the Park City resorts get less snow and a shorter season than the Salt Lake County resorts such as Snowbird, but they are far easier to reach.

Olympic town, film town

Park City Mountain and Deer Valley hosted the ski and snowboard events of the 2002 Winter Olympics and are expected to do so again in 2034; the 2002 bobsleigh, skeleton and luge track survives at the Utah Olympic Park. The city is home to the United States Ski Team and a training base for members of the Australian freestyle team, and outdoor brands including Rossignol USA, backcountry.com and Skullcandy have their headquarters here. For 48 years it was the home of the Sundance Film Festival, which alone accounted for about $80 million of the $529.8 million the city brought to Utah’s economy in 2021, and the Sundance Institute still runs its Utah office from Park City. Off the slopes there are bars, clubs, restaurants and the largest collection of factory outlet stores in northern Utah, with reservoirs, hot springs, forests and hiking and biking trails nearby. A few scenes of Dumb and Dumber were shot here, too.

Getting there

Salt Lake City International (SLC) is roughly 43 km away as the crow flies, an unusually short hop for a resort of this scale. Lift tickets, snow reports and practical details are on the official website.