Several lower-mountain trails at Park City Mountain are temporarily closed this summer as crews reshape the Three Kings terrain park in preparation for winter.
Trails beneath the First Time lift and Three Kings lift, including lower sections of Jenni’s Trail, Seldom Seen, First Time Return and Silver Spur, are closed to ensure public safety while heavy machinery and dirt-hauling operations are underway.
Crews are regrading the terrain to build large jump features directly into the dirt, reducing the need for early-season snowmaking and speeding up the park’s winter opening.
“The jumps at Three Kings, they’re big features, so they take a lot of snow to make. This will let us build a really good portion of those jumps out of dirt instead of snow,” said John Kanaly, senior manager of communications. “By winter, a big portion of the work will already be done. It certainly saves on manpower and improves efficiency in general.”
By sculpting features into the landscape now, the resort can use less artificial snow in the winter, allowing for earlier access to the terrain park and freeing up snowmaking resources for the rest of the mountain. That way, both the terrain park and other areas on the mountain can get open earlier than they otherwise would.
“It means we have to make a lot less snow for the terrain park, which means we’ll be able to get it open sooner,” said Kanaly. “We know people around here really love and care about the terrain park, so we want to make sure that we’re getting it open as soon as possible.”
The dirt for the project is being repurposed from excavation work at the Sunrise Gondola base terminal in Canyons Village. The resort is replacing the old Sunrise chair with a 10-passenger, 6,500-foot gondola this summer, providing skiers and snowboarders with another access point to the upper mountain from Canyons Village starting next winter.
“We always want to improve all aspects of our resort, and this was just an opportunistic moment to improve both the Canyons side with the gondola and the terrain park on the Mountain Village side,” said Kanaly.
The summer trail impacts do not currently have an end date, though the work is expected to continue over the next few weeks. Given the resort’s limited seasonal window for maintenance and the timely availability of outgoing dirt from the Sunrise Gondola excavation, Kanaly said the trails will be reopened as soon as it is safe and logistically feasible to do so.
“Even if this work isn’t directly cutting into the trail, there’s a huge safety factor,” Kanaly said. “There’s rock falling, dump trucks and other heavy machinery. You don’t want people on the trails right now.”
The closures are expected to be resolved before the end of the summer. With only small portions of the trails affected, minimal work will be needed to rebuild and reopen them once construction is complete. Park City Mountain encourages summer users to check the resort’s social media channels for the latest updates on trail conditions and closures.
