Brighton, UT – Each of Utah’s four
Cottonwood Canyons resorts – Alta, Snowbird, Solitude and Brighton –
has its own unique character and spirit. For skiers only, Alta exudes charm
through its exceptional terrain and throwback culture. Snowbird delivers
steeps, snowfall and creature comforts on a grand scale. Solitude provides
just that – lots of elbow room on surprisingly varied terrain.
Brighton, though, at first seems somewhat of an anomaly. nIt’s
steeped in history, but its historical significance isn’t readily obvious
to the casual visitor. It receives nearly double the number of annual visitors
as does Solitude, but it’s hard to notice. Instead of Snowbird’s
sprawling concrete and glass hotels, Brighton claims only one tiny inn. While
Alta disallows snowboarders, Brighton actively embraces the culture. Brighton
has more intermediate terrain than any of the other three. While the other
three are somewhat refined, Brighton is the brash, irreverent sibling. Whereas
Solitude holds local skiers at arm’s length, Brighton is “where
Utah learns to ski.”
In the final analysis, that’s it. Brighton is a family-friendly
resort that caters to both visitors and locals alike, uniquely equipped to
breed a new generation of snow sliders, yet with enough terrain and diversity
to maintain their interest for years to come.
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?
It was around 1:30 p.m. at Brighton that I first noticed a sudden
surge in the ankle-biter population on the trails. The number of school-age
children on each and every intermediate run miraculously spiked. Then I saw
it: bus after bus lined up behind the Alpine Rose day lodge at the base of
the novice Explorer chairlift. Children swarmed the snow next to the buses
like a nest of fire ants, chaperones barely able to control the chaos.
Brighton, it seems, has a very active weekly program for local
schoolchildren. Each day, different school districts in the Salt Lake Valley
send their students to Brighton to learn how to ski.
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The view from Clayton Peak across toward Mt. Millicent |
Alternative children’s programs offered to the general
public take place on consecutive Saturdays or Sundays. Your child learns
to ski or snowboard with the same instructors and the same fellow students
for multiple weeks in succession – the best way to introduce a child,
or an adult, to the sport. Multi-week and multi-day programs are offered
by Brighton’s Ski & Snowboard School, aimed at adults, seniors, telemarkers
and women. Reasonably priced single day packages including rentals, lessons
and lift tickets are available for not only the never-ever, but for any other
ability level as well.
Brighton has banked for years on customer loyalty. Give folks
an incentive to come to Brighton to learn to ski or snowboard, dangle a carrot,
make sure they have fun, and they’ll keep coming back. It’s a concept
that works to the tune of 375,000 visits per year.
“It’s just how we are … we sell fun,” said
Dan Malstrom, Brighton’s marketing and sales director.
Perhaps Brighton’s most family-friendly and loyalty-building
feature is that children 10 and under ski free with absolutely no strings
attached. Even for season passes. Just show up with a signed release and
a birth certificate, and that’s it!
Most of Brighton’s lifts, including their three high-speed
quad chairs, service terrain for all abilities, allowing family members of
varying skill levels to ride the lift together, ski the terrain of their choice,
and meet again at the bottom of the chair.
SNOWBOARDING CENTRAL
Take a few runs at Brighton, and you’ll instantly notice
a dramatically different demographic on the slopes. Snowboarding is big business
at Brighton, accounting for a greater percentage of slope traffic than just
about anywhere outside of southern California. The resort is home to an official
Burton Method Center, including Learn-To-Ride equipment specially designed
to make learning the sport easier for a first timer. Striving for personal
attention, and the rapid learning curve that it fosters, the Method Center
utilizes a maximum student to instructor ratio of 4:1.
Even Microsoft took note while designing Amped, its new
video game for the Xbox console. Brighton is one of only several resorts
featured in the electronic snowboard game, for which the entire Crest area
was recreated with surprising realism. Many of the professional snowboarders
who call Brighton home participated in the game’s development and its
terrain features.
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ONLINE VIDEO View Bountiful
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As you might therefore expect, Brighton has two huge (and hugely
popular) terrain parks under the Crest Express and Majestic lifts. There’s
even a warming hut specifically for park users atop the Majestic chair. The
parks sport a halfpipe and a superpipe, among other terrain features and hits.
It’s tempting here to wisecrack about how the differences
between Brighton and its neighbors are “night and day,” but for
your sake I’ll resist. If you discount the tiny Chickadee lift at Snowbird,
Brighton is the only one of the four Cottonwood Canyons resorts to turn on
the sodium vapor lamps for night skiing. Lights cover some 200 acres of
terrain for all abilities, spread over 20 trails serviced by three lifts –
the most night skiing and riding terrain in Utah. It’s this very sort
of thing that makes Brighton very local-friendly – if you have to work
during the day, you can still get out in the evening to make some turns.
UTAH’S FIRST SKI AREA
Established in 1936 with a rope tow fashioned from ½-inch wire
rope and a discarded elevator drum by members of the Alpine Ski Club (later
to become the Wasatch Mountain Club), Brighton earns the distinction as Utah’s
first ski area. Two years later, the group built a T-bar to compete with
the newfangled contraption erected across the ridge at Alta in 1937. During
World War II, however, the lift fell into the hands of Zane Doyle and his
father-in-law, Willard Jensen.
In the post-war years, competition erupted high in Big Cottonwood
Canyon as another ski company erected Brighton’s first chairlift in 1946,
a single chair on Mt. Millicent, and Doyle and Jensen followed suit with their
own double chairlift in 1955. It was the region’s first double chair,
and was so wildly successful that a second double – the Mary chair, located
where the Crest Express is now – was financed and built by the Doyle/Jensen
team. Brighton as we know it, though, didn’t begin to gel until 1963
when Doyle and Jensen bought out their competitor and placed all of Brighton’s
lifts and trails under a single lift ticket.
Enter Boyne USA in 1987. Ski resort pioneer Everett Kircher’s
holding company, which in addition to Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands in
Michigan owns Crystal Mountain in Washington and Big Sky in Montana, purchased
Brighton and began to invest heavily in the resort’s infrastructure.
Three new high-speed quads, a triple chair, expanded night ski terrain, over
200 acres of snowmaking, and a new base lodge are only some of the improvements
added since Boyne’s arrival.
Boyne may have brought Brighton into the big leagues, but they
haven’t forgotten their roots cultivated by local skiers.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Brighton and nearby Solitude are now once again joined by the
SolBright connector trail. Last utilized during the 1994-1995 season, the
short, low intermediate run allows for skiing and snowboarding between the
two resorts. They are once again offering a joint lift ticket to take advantage
of their proximity to one another.
While a lift along the ridge between the two resorts is not
necessary to commute on snow between one and the other, it will certainly
make the process easier, and accordingly a SolBright connector lift is contemplated
as part of Solitude’s Master Development Plan, approved by the U.S. Forest
Service on January 15, 2002. The lift also requires the approval of Salt
Lake County, as it will in part traverse private land via a route from the
top of Brighton’s Evergreen Chair to the base of Solitude’s Summit
Chair, and a decision regarding several appeals filed in response to the USFS
approval is due in April 2002. Barring any litigation filed by parties who
may be unhappy with the result of the appeal, Solitude hopes to have the lift
in place within the next two to three years.
Staying in a hotel room at Solitude, we opted to arrive at Brighton
via the SolBright connector trail. Disembarking Solitude’s Summit lift,
the narrow trail wound past Twin Lakes Reservoir as the spectacular ramparts
of Wolverine Cirque were bathed in morning sunlight. The occasional glint
of the sun’s reflection off a hiker’s equipment pointed out several
backcountry skiers ascending the ridge of Mt. Millicent above the lifts.
Brighton has an open-boundary policy, lending access to nearly limitless backcountry
in the adjacent Wolverine Cirque and other Wasatch basins and ridges to advanced
skiers armed with the appropriate knowledge and equipment for avalanche science
and backcountry survival. Perfect for an area blessed with an annual average
of 500 inches of Utah’s light, dry snowfall. Such access is made easier
by Brighton’s policy of selling single-ride lift tickets for those who
desire them – why can’t more resorts follow this practice?
Other sectors of backcountry terrain, such as the Mary Chutes
and the Pioneer Backcountry, drop like stalactites between pods of Brighton’s
lift-served skiing. The former provides adrenaline junkies with short, steep
couloirs accessible via little more than a gravity traverse from the lifts.
Getting back underway after pausing to admire the view into
Wolverine Cirque, it wasn’t long before we arrived at the top of Brighton’s
Evergreen chair, idle in the midweek quiet. Carving fast GS turns down Main
Street, we arrived at the base of the Millicent lift in time to meet up with
resort marketing and sales director Dan Malstrom.
Malstrom is himself all about fun. While other resort hosts
throughout our Wasatch week were somewhat reserved and on skis, Malstrom was
a laid-back jokester intent upon breaking the sound barrier on his snowboard.
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Brighton’s latest ad campaign upset some of Utah’s
Click here to open a full-size Brighton trail map in
The Heber Valley from Brighton’s Snake Creek Pass. |
Having met, it’s not hard to understand the irreverent
approach with which Brighton markets itself. Not shy about attracting publicity,
Brighton embarked this year upon a daring advertising campaign throughout
the Salt Lake Valley, daring because it poked fun at the region’s predominately
Mormon culture. “Wife. Wife. Wife. Husband. – High Speed Quads,”
read one billboard. “Bring ‘em young,” read another, parodying
the name of the early Church of Latter Day Saints leader to bring attention
to Brighton’s free skiing program for children 10 and under.
We chatted about the campaign as we ascended the Millicent chair,
gradually rising above treeline with a broad bowl to the left and below the
peak of Mt. Millicent, and wide, rolling cruisers to the right. Given the
rare lack of recent snowfall and repeated freeze/thaw cycles, we opted for
the latter, repeating the same high-speed turns that we’d enjoyed on
Main Street. The terrain on Millicent dips and drops in a series of steps
and rolls, creating some infinitely interesting cruising.
Mt. Millicent is but one portion of Brighton’s terrain,
laid out in a large semicircle at the head of Big Cottonwood Canyon. At the
opposite end of the resort, the Great Western Express chair accesses some
1,745 vertical feet of intermediate and advanced terrain on Clayton Peak,
the greatest vertical of any lift at the resort. The slopes of Deer Valley
lie just on the other side of Clayton Peak, while Park City is right on the
other side of the ridge opposite the ski area that’s marked by several
radio transmission towers. In between Mt. Millicent and Clayton Peak, another
four lifts rise toward the ridgeline to service predominately novice and intermediate
slopes and trails, albeit with a somewhat annoying topographic saddle at mid-mountain.
We continued to gradually work our way to climber’s left
across the resort. Next up in the succession of lifts was the Crest Express
detachable quad chair, the latter part of which ascends a steeper pitch as
it reaches the top of the ridge between Pioneer Peak and Preston Peak. Eyeing
what appeared to be some stellar tree skiing lines traversing the liftline,
I parted ways with the rest of the group to explore. A delightfully aggressive
line dipped into the conifer forests below, the pungent smell of pine filling
my senses as the trees whizzed past. Alas, my perfect line deposited me on
a large flat expanse at the aforementioned saddle, turning my exit from the
woods into a laborious trudge through the snow that was by now setting up
like heavy white glue.
Rather than descending entirely to the resort base, our group
reassembled at the base of the Snake Creek Express, another of Brighton’s
high-speed detachable chairs. Pausing at the top to drink in the view that
encompassed the imposing rock hulk of Mt. Timpanogos to the south, the expansive
Heber Valley to the east, and miles of backcountry bliss in between, we headed
into Lone Star, a moderate and naturally quirky run with a bump line ideal
for learning moguls.
Before heading up the Great Western Express, we ducked into
Molly Green’s on the upper floor of a 1950s-vintage A-frame for a bite
to eat. A full bar, pool tables, and table service await the diner at Molly
Green’s, and the colossal burrito was more than anyone could handle for
lunch. Those opting for a quicker return to the slopes will find cafeteria
service at the Alpine Rose, and skiers and snowboarders riding the Millicent
or Evergreen lifts may save themselves a trudge back to the main base area
by grabbing a sandwich at the Brighton Chalet on that side of the parking
lot.
We made our way after lunch through the beehive of schoolchildren
to the Great Western Express, which cuts somewhat across the terrain’s
fall line en route to a point on Clayton Peak just below its bald summit.
The skiing here seems oddly one-sided, as the lift hugs the ski resort boundary.
Heading across the rope and outside of the resort here leads into the Hidden
Canyon Backcountry, a true terrain trap in avalanche-prone conditions but
delightful sliding when the snowpack is stable.
Heading the other way, the skiing off of the Great Western Express
represents the steepest marked terrain on Brighton’s map, including the
new Endless Winter. The highlight of my day at the resort, the run falls
away steeply through open areas and islands of trees before narrowing into
a gully as it joins the rest of the trail network. At times ripping the trail,
at other times spanked by it, Endless Winter has character that lasts for
days.
Much like Brighton itself..
IF YOU GO …Sleeping: Other than that, you’ve Eating: At night, Après-Ski: Gettin’ there: |