Is One Day at Deer Valley Really Worth $329?
I’d rather not ask, but Alterra is making me.
I’d rather not do this. I like Deer Valley. I like skiing there. I like the fast lifts and friendly staffers and strangely-for-a-ski-area edible food and tree laps off the westside lifts and Ontario Bowl and Triangle Trees. I like how the new East Village base cuts out the drive through Park City and how the underway expansion will nearly triple the ski area’s acreage in a state that needs more skier capacity and how the new Keetley bubble sixer pops like a branded firework up the gut of the new terrain. And I like all that so much that I’ll often ski Deer Valley even though the continent’s best skiing sits 10 miles east at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon, with better views and cheaper lift tickets and a fuckton more snow. So I’m careful not to gratuitously bash Deer Valley just to fit in with the Brobots who love to hate the place for being so not the Cottonwoods. But come on with this:
Yes that reads $329 for a peak day at Deer Valley. Which means that it’s time for the most ridiculous annual ski story: who will charge idiots* who don’t plan their ski days further in advance than the Olympics the most money for one day of snosportskiing this coming winter? And the answer right now is Deer Valley. Vail I’m sure will beat them. Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek topped out at $329 last winter, and Park City was for some algorithmically preposterous reason one dollar less expensive. But Vail Resorts is either at the end of an existential crisis or the beginning of institutional disintegration and the company hasn’t put lift tickets on sale yet, so today we get to talk about Deer Valley.
*I am not calling them idiots personally, but Sarasota Steve, who is splurging on his first ski vacation in a decade after marrying Sarasota Sara in 2016, bringing Sarasota Sara Jr. and Sarasota Steve Jr. into the world in 2018 and 2020, and fighting his way to the top of Sales at Sarasota Sal’s Sailboats, Salami & Chainsaws, and remembers grumbling over $126 lift tickets Christmas Week 2015, will feel like he just failed an IQ test when tickets that, if pegged to inflation rates, would be $172 are instead nearly double that.
There are so many good ways that we could talk about Deer Valley: as a service-oriented gentleman offering you a Cuban and a glass of ‘42 in a decade dominated by the gleefully cruel and the righteously smug; as a do-something-huge-relatively-quickly case study in a nation of concerned-citizen project-stoppers; as an over-lifted and over-groomed families-on-holiday compromise between the dreams of Utah pow and the reality that most tourists have no idea how to ski it.
But Alterra, by pricing a ski day at the tip-top of the global market for such an experience, is forcing us to discuss the company’s self-proclaimed greatest mountain in this way: is Deer Valley the best ski resort in North America? I mean I don’t think it’s even the best ski area on the chart above (probably fourth; sorry Sunday River, you know I love you, but, Utah). We’re talking about the same Deer Valley that ranks 21st nationally in vertical drop, 67th in average annual snowfall, and, last season, 27th in total skiable acreage. Less tangible but as difficult to refute: Deer Valley’s lifts (Keetley excepted), lack the flare of Big Sky’s mega-machines; that Wasatch Back viewshed doesn’t pop like the Sawtooths off Sun Valley or Lake Tahoe off Heavenly; there’s no connected village, historic (Aspen, Telluride) or otherwise (Vail, Palisades); the short steeps don’t compare to the screaming, full-tilt, top-to-bottom bangers at Aspen Highlands or Beaver Creek; and Deer Valley isn’t joyous like Mammoth, playful like Palisades, awe-inspiring like Jackson, powdry like Targhee, or seated on a freaking volcano like Bachelor.
But you don’t have to leave Utah to be disappointed with Deer Valley. The ski area is tied for second-to-last in annual snowfall among Utah’s 14 public ski areas above 500 vertical feet: