Park City Mountain is the largest ski resort in the United States — a single, lift-served expanse of roughly 7,300 acres rising straight out of the old mining town of Park City. It reached that size in 2015, when Vail Resorts connected the original Park City Mountain Resort to the neighboring Canyons Resort with the new Quicksilver Gondola, stitching seventeen peaks and two separate base areas into one mountain under a single name. Today it spans more than 300 runs and over 40 lifts, rides on the Epic Pass, and tops out above 10,000 feet on terrain that drops some 3,200 vertical feet to the valley floor.
The resort grew out of the same silver boom that built the town below it. When the slopes first opened as Treasure Mountains in 1963, there was no aerial tram to the top: skiers rode an old ore train nearly 2.5 miles into the mountain through the pitch-dark Spiro Tunnel, then boarded a mining hoist that lifted them 1,750 feet to the surface before they could point their skis downhill. More than a thousand miles of abandoned silver-mine tunnels still run beneath these slopes and under neighboring Deer Valley. The hill was renamed the Park City Ski Area in the mid-1960s and took its current name in 1996.
Two base areas anchor the mountain. The original side rises right from town, where the Town Lift carries skiers up from the foot of Park City Main Street and the historic core of bars, galleries, and restaurants sits a short walk from the snow. The Canyons Village side, several miles north toward Kimball Junction, is the larger and more modern of the two, with its own lodging and a new ten-passenger gondola opening for the 2025-26 season. During the 2002 Winter Olympics the resort hosted the snowboarding events and the men's and women's alpine giant slalom, while the ski jumping and sliding sports ran a few miles away at Utah Olympic Park.
The mountain made national news in the winter of 2024-25 for a reason that had nothing to do with snow. On December 27, 2024, the roughly 200 members of the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association walked off the job over wages and benefits — the first ski patrol strike at a major American resort in recent memory. The walkout fell across the peak holiday weeks, and with only a fraction of the terrain open and lift lines stretching for hours, frustrated visitors and viral videos turned a labor dispute into a story carried far beyond Utah. After thirteen days the two sides ratified a contract, with higher base pay, an average raise of about four dollars an hour, and improved benefits running through April 2027, and the patrollers returned to the snow.
Getting here is unusually easy for a resort this size. Salt Lake City International Airport is only about a 40-minute drive west, down Interstate 80 and out through the Wasatch canyons — among the shortest airport-to-slopes transfers of any major ski destination in North America. Winter is the headline season, running generally from late November into April; in summer the lifts turn again for an extensive network of lift-served mountain biking and hiking.
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