Powder days are for sharing. Alta Ski Patrol indulges in some perks of the job on a deep day in the Wasatch. Photo: Alta Ski Area/Photo-John
I’ll never forget the time I skied at Alta, UT. I was on a trip with my family almost 15 years ago, and we stayed in Park City, assuming we’d bounce around and ski a different resort each day. That is, until we skied Alta on our second day, timing it perfectly with a 10-inch overnight storm.
We gorged ourselves on lift-accessed powder, skiing the High Traverse, aka the “High T,” bopping through the trees and cliffs under the Wildcat lift, hiking out to Catherine’s. It was like a dream world, where everything was soft. Fresh flakes kept falling out of the sky, refilling our tracks. We didn’t bother skiing anywhere else for the rest of the week.
That is, we would soon find out, par for the course at Alta—world class skiing, indulgent pow days, and an inviting vibe that feels like coming home.
TSKJ 18.1, Tips Up; “April 6 was one of the best storm days of the season in the Wasatch. It had snowed about five inches overnight then raged all day, easily another foot.” Colin Becker in Alta, UT. Photo: Lee Cohen
This year, Alta is celebrating their 88th anniversary as a ski area. Eighty-eight years of powder skiing is an impressive number, no doubt, decades beyond some of North America’s biggest resorts. But it’s not divisible by 5 or 10. So, why celebrate 88? Well, drop into a pristine slope with a friend, look back up at your tracks, and you’ll quickly find your answer.
Before I got to lay down my own tracks at Alta, I remember hearing whispers of the powder skiing plunder one might find in the Wasatch. Deep, low-density, plentiful. The local crowd is about as proud as it gets, and the excitement for skiing in Little Cottonwood is contagious.
Alta ski patrollers putting on a Powder 8 clinic. Photo: Alta Ski Area/Lee Cohen
But long before Alta was a ski area revered for Champagne powder, the area was better known for other valuable resources. General Patrick E. Connor discovered silver ore at the head of Little Cottonwood Canyon in 1864, and by 1871 the small town of Alta, previously a Mormon settlement, had become a mining town. During the mining heyday, up to 8,000 temporary residents lived in Alta, by far the peak—these days, there are only a couple hundred year-round residents.
By the early 1920s, mining had fizzled out. The town of Alta was largely abandoned, ravaged by decades of mining that had stripped the environment and threatened Salt Lake City’s water supply. In 1935, the US Forest Service hired Norwegian ski jumper Alf Engen to help determine winter recreation sites near Salt Lake City. After skiing all over the area, he deemed the steep slopes above the town of Alta to be the best site for winter recreation in the Wasatch.
In 1938, the Salt Lake Winter Sports Association raised $10,000 to build the Collins single-chair, repurposing old mine trolleys and salvaged timber, making it the fourth chairlift in the US and the first in Utah. In January of 1939, Alta Ski Area opened to the public, charging $1.50 for a day pass, or 25 cents for a single ride.
Eighty-eight years later, Alta is ripe with firsts. The first chairlift in Utah, the birthplace of snow science in North America, the first place in North America to utilize Wyseen Towers for avalanche mitigation, automated systems that are now widely used in Europe and North America. Most of those firsts link back to one thing—deep powder skiing.
Open the pages of any ski publication, ours especially, and you’ll likely see an overwhelming amount of representation from the 2,600-acre ski area. There’s plenty of gnarly skiing at Alta, sure—Baldy chutes, High T, and Wildcat cliff hucks galore. But the most iconic images from Alta don’t usually feature the most rugged or intimidating skiing. It’s the ultra-deep turns, low-density flakes flickering all around, moments of pure joy that anyone could look at and say: I wish I was right there, right now.
TSKJ 17.4, Tips Up; “John Collinson and my son Sam Cohen were getting footage for the Wasatch, UT, segment for the Matchstick Productions film The Land of Giants. The two have been skiing together at Alta and Snowbird since they were little kids, but this was the first time I got to shoot them at the same time. We had perfect pow and Johnny was charging.” Photo: Lee Cohen
TSKJ 18.1, Gallerie: Lexi Dowdall's Why in Watercolor; Lexi Dowdall, painter and Alta marketing extraordinaire, shows a little love for her home ski area. Photo: Re Wikstrom
TSKJ 18.4, Table of Contents; “Cars at Alta, UT on January 15, 2024 after 83 inches of snow fell in six days. Storm totals each day were 12”, 14.5”, 9.5”, 9”, 21”, and 17”.” Photo: Lee Cohen