Solitude Mountain Resort Company
Solitude Mountain Resort
In the early 1900s, tenacious silver miners gave the name Solitude to the geographic area now encompassed by Solitude Mountain Resort. The peak of mining activity in the canyon was during the 1870s and 1880s. At that time, the mining area was called the Mountain Lake District and hundreds of mines where located at or within a stone’s throw of Solitude.
Solitude Mountain Resort was developed by Robert M. Barrett, who made his fortune as a Moab uranium miner during the early 1950s and moved to Salt Lake City for the skiing at Alta Ski Area. Barrett bought much of the land in Big Cottonwood Canyon and started construction in 1956. The ski area opened in the fall of 1957 with two chairlifts providing access to most of the area now skied on the front of the mountain.
The Deseelhorst family purchased the resort in the late 1970s. In 1982, the Summit Lift was added opening Honeycomb Canyon to lift-served backcountry skiing. The Deseelhorst’s installed Utah’s first high-speed detachable quad chairlift in 1989. The family then focused on a new village and opened Creekside Condominiums in 1995, the first of our six overnight accommodations, and The Inn at Solitude was completed in 1996. Intrawest Corporation was brought in to build the remaining condominiums under the master plan in 1998 and the Village was completed in 2001.
Deer Valley Resort, a limited partnership between Royal Street Corporation (Lessing Stern, Chairman of the Board) and Red Gables Corporation (Roger Penske, Chairman of the Board) purchased Solitude on May 1, 2015. This purchase positioned Solitude as a wholly owned subsidiary of Deer Valley Resort.
On August 21, 2017, Deer Valley Resort announced that they had entered into a purchase agreement with a newly formed resort company controlled by affiliates of KSL Capital Partners, LLC and Henry Crown and Company that in July joined Intrawest Resorts Holdings, Inc., Mammoth Resorts, and Squaw Valley Ski Holdings. The closing on this purchase was completed on Tuesday, October 10, 2017. Solitude Mountain Resort, LLC was not part of the purchase but has been retained by the partners.
The vision of our partners continues and there is a lot of excitement and anticipation as they look to grow Solitude to be the best that it can be.
