Sundance Announces Terrain Expansion, 2nd High-Speed Quad
“This is going to change the way people see Sundance in more ways than one.” - Sundance COO Czar Johnson.
Saddle up the electric horse
Utah folks often tell me some version of this: Sundance isn’t the biggest or snowiest or highest or tallest ski area in the state, but it sure is the prettiest. Hard to argue that. Layer cake eons typeset into canyon walls dominate the base. Mt. Timpanogos looms in its god-perch to the west. Alpine bowls surround the summit like white oceans.
But the view to the north, if you’re handed the impossible task of running Sundance the ski area, is, frankly, a bit terrifying. Six bunched ski areas, all bigger and taller and higher and snowier than you are. Nearly 20,000 acres total. One hundred twenty lifts between them, 56 of them detachables, one of them a tram that doubles as (perhaps) North America’s greatest ski lift. Five of these resorts have united under the Ikon marquee. The other is an Epic Pass headliner and the largest ski area in the United States. Alterra-owned Deer Valley is in the midst of an expansion equal in size to seven Sundances. All six sit closer to the airport than Sundance, a ski area that, if most tourists have heard of it at all, they confuse with the longtime Park City movie festival of the same name, which, after next year, will flee Utah for Boulder.
So what to do? Decades of leaning on rustic charm and saying “did you know that Robert Redford once owned…” feels like an expired strategy in the hyperactive 2020s. Leveling up to your competitors is an impossible ambition when they are among the finest ski centers in this hemisphere. Being Mt. Local loses some family appeal when snowmaking is limited, all of your chairlifts are slow and lack safety bars, and your beginner lift is a ropetow. Yes, it helps to be pretty. But that’s never enough to be the only thing.
But, since 2020, new owners, new energy: an out-of-base high-speed quad replaced an over-complicated dinosaur lift; the Wildwood expansion opened a novice-oriented ski area within the ski area; a trio of progression carpets displaced the handle tow; snowmaking, night skiing, parking all expanded; a new baselodge at the base of Jake’s reoriented the day-skier experience. Sundance rising. Skier visits increased. But one piece remained: the mountain’s back acres, its highest and best terrain, remained fenced in by slow lifts. Not an unforgivable shortcoming, but a tough sell in modern, the-Olympics-are-coming (again), pass-connected Utah.
Sundance plans to fix that. Today, the resort confirmed that a long-teased high-speed backside quad will rise for the 2026-27 ski season. A 165-acre, two-phase expansion will boost skiable acreage by 32 percent, with nine new trails on 60 acres opening for winter 2025-26. The Electric Horseman lift – so called in honor of the 1979 film of the same name starring Redford – will rise 1,850 vertical feet from the base of the Wildwood terrain and unload adjacent to Red’s, which will remain intact as an auxiliary lift (the Flathead triple will also remain for the time being). Here’s how it all lays out:
And here’s Sundance’s current trailmap - for context, the new runs will live looker’s left of the Vertigo trail:
The new lift and terrain will complete the major on-mountain components of Sundance’s modernization, and create, resort officials hope, an alternative to the tourist-oriented, megapass-loaded mountains closer to Salt Lake.
“People are getting disenfranchised with the high volume, and there's definitely a quest and a search right now for the type of experience that Sundance is delivering,” Sundance Chief Operating Officer Czar Johnson said in an interview with The Storm. “So we think by making ourselves a little bit more attractive on paper and based on stats, we can draw in people who are done with that high-volume experience and are still looking for a high-quality experience, with interesting dynamic terrain and good infrastructure and fast-moving lifts, but on a scaled-down version of what they're seeing in those other areas.”
When Electric Horseman opens next year, Sundance’s lift fleet will stand as one of the newest on the continent, with six new lifts installed since 2012. The circa 1975 Flathead triple, made redundant by the new high-speed quad, “will eventually go away,” according to Johnson. While just two of the resort’s lifts will be detachables, they will jointly grant high-speed access to 100 percent of the resort’s lift-served terrain for the first time. Every modern lift on the mountain will be a Doppelmayr, with the exception of Wildwood, which is a Skytrac model.
Significant as this expansion – Sundance’s second in just three years – will be for the resort, the 165-acre addition is a small piece of Utah’s rapidly changing ski landscape. Since 2020, Utah operators have installed 38 new aerial lifts, including 11 scheduled to rise this summer. Many of these lifts will replace legacy machines, but more than half of them serve terrain expansions. Deer Valley is set to nearly triple in size. Powder Mountain is growing in seemingly every direction at once, and Nordic Valley more than doubled in size with its 2020 six-pack project.
The chosen line
Sundance officials have teased a high-speed backside lift for years – resort President and GM Chad Linebaugh was debating between a six-pack and a quad when he joined me on the podcast in 2022 (43:11). But the final alignment and lift type remained unclear until today’s announcement, as resort officials gauged the impact of the 2022 Wildwood expansion on skier flow and traffic.
A quad was the more affordable option “by a couple million,” Linebaugh said, simplifying the capacity decision.
While the lift’s unload point was never really in question, Sundance entertained a variety of different load locations and liftlines up the mountain. Engineers ruled out building directly over the existing Flathead line, because it crosses over too many trails and loads too high to accommodate single-lift lapping of the expansion terrain.
Two primary factors drove the decision to base Electric Horseman’s load station adjacent to Wildwood: the new, $5 million Mountain Camp day lodge at the base of Jake’s lift, and the success of the 2022 expansion. The lodge opened in January, and, combined with earlier start times for Jake’s, immediately drew huge numbers of day skiers away from the lower parking lots, resort officials say. A short ride up this lift gives skiers direct access to the green-blue spiderweb of Wildwood trails, which proved “way more impactful than any of us had imagined,” Johnson said.
The new lift will load slightly uphill from Wildwood. Sundance considered dropping Electric Horseman’s load farther downhill from Wildwood, but the canyon narrows quickly from that elevation, and avalanche risk increases significantly, Linebaugh said.
With the load and unload station sites selected, Sundance engineers took great care when designing the liftline’s aesthetics. Sundance is a complicated mountain, offering a series of narrow ridges that dip into broad funnels. Imagine a series of enormous halfpipes streaming parallel down the mountain. Electric Horseman’s 16 lift towers line these ridges wherever possible, and current designs call for just one tower rising out of Bishop Bowl. Linebaugh called the chosen liftline, which stretches for approximately one mile, “incredibly complicated.” He acknowledged that “some people will maybe not want to ski one of these bowls and see a lift going across it, but we can’t do a lot about that other than just not put the lift in.”
Sundance also considered upgrading Red’s – a 2016 Doppelmayr fixed-grip quad – to a detachable. The pricetag, it turned out, “wouldn’t be much less” than building an all-new lift, and a Red’s upgrade would leave Sundance with the same core inefficiency that plagues it now: a three-lift ride – Wildwood to Outlaw to Red’s – to lap the existing and expansion terrain far skier’s right off the summit.
“This is going to change the way people see Sundance in more ways than one.”
Including the cost of Electric Horseman and the attendant expansion, Sundance’s new owners (a consortium consisting of outfits called Broadreach Capital Partners and Cedar Capital Partners), will have invested more than $40 million in the mountain’s revitalization, officials say.
Though just a few hundred feet longer than Outlaw, Electric Horseman will cost approximately 45 percent more to install, a figure that underscores just how severely the price of new lifts has escalated over the past several years. Two additional factors put an exclamation point on this number: Outlaw is just four years old, and, unlike Electric Horseman, it’s broken up by a long – and presumably expensive – midstation.
The investment, Linebaugh hopes, will help Sundance “capture our fair share of the destination market, while staying very committed to our local market. This is going to change the way people see Sundance in more ways than one.”
Despite the on-mountain build-up, Sundance is carefully preserving its small-footprint feel. A new base area hotel, scheduled to open next winter, will house just 63 rooms and “was designed and developed to fit in nature,” Johnson said.
With that, ownership’s modernization vision will be mostly fulfilled. The vast majority of Sundance’s 5,000-plus acres will remain locked into conservation easements.
“I think one of the ongoing charms of Sundance is that beyond this, nothing else is going to be developed up in this canyon,” Johnson said. “Sundance is going to very much remain looking like it is today, and you can't say that about so many ski areas, and that’s going to become even more special as time goes on.”