It seems likely that Canyons ski area will become a base area of Park City Mountain Resort next winter when the ski slopes at the two Utah areas are physically linked and merged to create the largest ski area in the United States.
Park City has three ski areas surrounding it, Park City Mountain Resort, which can be accessed on foot from the heart of the resort itself, along with Deer Valley and Canyons, which are separate resorts accessed by lifts a few miles from the resort town itself.
The change of status of Canyons to a Park City Mountain Resort (PCMR) base has not yet been officially confirmed and announced and is in many ways just a technicality, but it would reflect Park City going from having three separate areas to two, one of them the largest in the country.
Canyons was once a small ‘local’s hill’ known as Park West but was then re-named ‘Wolf Mountain’ and then ‘The Canyons’ after being acquired by the American Skiing Company when that multi-resort franchise owned it, investing large sums to dramatically expand the ski area with high speed lifts. Its most recent name tweak saw the ‘The’ officially dropped a few seasons back, so it is now just ‘Canyons Resort.’
The ‘downgrading’ of Canyons from stand-alone resort to part of PCMR are similar to many corporate take overs when one company absorbs another, and also to what happened at Big Sky Resort in Montana to the north, the holder of the ‘biggest ski area in the USA’ title last season after it absorbed neighbouring Moonlight Basin, another former American Skiing Company resort.
For 2015-2016 the combined Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort area, connected by a new 8 passenger gondola connection, along with the new King Con Express Six-pack and Motherlode Express Quad in a fifty million US dollar expansion financed by owners Vail Resort will 7,300 acres, of terrain, 300+ trails, 38 lifts, seven terrain parks, six natural half pipes, one super pipe and one mini pipe.
The area will be the biggest in the US and second biggest in North America after Whistler Blackcomb.
