Solitude lives up to its name. Tucked into Big Cottonwood Canyon a couple of miles below Brighton, it is the quieter of the two resorts at the head of the canyon — about 1,200 acres of skiing and snowboarding, around 80 runs, three bowls, and roughly 500 inches of snow a year, usually with shorter lift lines than the bigger names a canyon or two over. Its origin story is fitting: the resort was started in the mid-1950s by a uranium miner named Robert Barrett who, as the story goes, decided to build his own ski area after being turned away from the restrooms at Alta because they were reserved for guests.
The mountain's signature is Honeycomb Canyon, a long, largely ungroomed valley of bowl and tree skiing that opened to lift service in the 1980s and still feels backcountry-adjacent. Solitude has a record of quiet firsts, too: it installed Utah's first detachable high-speed quad in 1989 and was the first resort in the state to put radio-frequency chips in its lift passes. The base is a compact, European-style village where you can park once and walk to the lifts.
Solitude is owned by Alterra Mountain Company — the same company behind Deer Valley — and offers unlimited access on the Ikon Pass. It connects to Brighton over the SolBright trail, linking the two Big Cottonwood resorts for anyone who wants to ski both in a day. The canyon road, State Route 190, climbs from the southeast edge of Salt Lake City, and Solitude leans hard on carpooling to keep the narrow corridor moving on busy mornings.
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