In recent years, the city and community homeowners associations have increased their efforts to lessen the threat of wildfires to the area through increased care for land in open spaces, especially following the wake-up call of the Parleys Canyon Fire.
But as a ski town, much of these forested areas belong to the resorts. In the wildland urban interface, the areas where wildlands and urban communities meet, efforts to reduce the chances of wildfire damage to a town are only effective as long as groups agree to certain strategies.
Historically, when a wildfire ignites in open spaces, it burns through until it naturally dies out, and this process becomes part of the forest health and life cycle. But imagine there was a home in the path of that fire — how can someone ensure the fire would leave the structure untouched? By taking away its fuels leading up to the home. This is called creating a defensible space.
Wildfire fuels are dead and dry trees, branches or brush, which can be eaily lit with a spark and burn quickly, contributing to the heat and strength of a fire. This biomass accumulates naturally in the life cycle of the forest, but with our homes in the way, manually removing these fuels is now a necessary step to protect from wildfire damage.
For Park City, this means Deer Valley Resort and Park City Mountain have their own work to do — to protect not only their own operations but the neighboring communities as well.
“We are that last line of defense if a fire were to come through before anything would impact Old Town. It’s got to come through us, so we feel like we can do some things to be a little bit proactive,” said Andy Vanhouten, the senior manager of ski patrol at Park City Mountain.
At Deer Valley, they also recognize that wildfire mitigation efforts go hand in hand with forest health management, said Victoria Schlaepfer, the sustainability manager for the resort.
“We largely are on private property. And so we feel like it’s our job to helpmaintain the health of our forests as best we can because we’re not seeing those requirements from the US Forest Service like some other ski resorts might see. So we took the responsibility on ourselves,” she said.
Deer Valley resort conducted controlled burns of slash piles on Flagstaff Mountain in November 2022.
David Jackson/Park Record
For both resorts, these efforts are the same accepted practices across wildland urban interface spaces: slashing and burning piles to remove excess wildfire fuels. Both resorts put together trained crews to take on these tasks — but they both said it wasn’t much different than the usual work required for resort management.
“For 18 years we’ve had our saw crew up here that’s done thinning and glading, primarily focused on enhancing the skiing in the winter,” said Vanhouten.
Before, crews would chop everything up and lay it flat, then snowpack would cover it, said Vanhouten. Now, with their commitment to fuels mitigation, teams build that material nto burn piles, trained by the U.S. Forest Service and their wildland urban interface team, said Vanhouten.
The same is true at Deer Valley, said Schlaepfer, whose crews now create burn piles from their cut dead and overgrown biomass.
“It just takes so many years for those piles to decay, so we decided to start using controlled burns as a technique to help manage those piles that we were creating. We weren’t just creating wildfire hazards throughout the mountain, we were actually taking those hazards away so that we didn’t have piles of decaying bio material just sitting on the mountain for 20 plus years,” said Schlaepfer.
Deer Valley had about 100 piles to burn this season, and they got through half, said Schlaepfer. With late storms and the resort’s fast-approaching opening day, crews weren’t able to safely burn as many piles as they’d hoped.
Snow on the ground, and forecasted storms help create the best conditions for pile burning, where there is snow to help put out the firesand a healthy clearing index, which is a measurement that indicates whether smoke will be carried up and out of the communities quickly. But, without much snow early on, Deer Valley had a few workarounds.
“One of the beauties of working at a ski resort is that anytime we’re doing a controlled burn, we typically have snowmaking in that area. So we have those hydrants charged so that if anything were to happen, we’re ready to quickly put out those fires,” said Schlaepfer.
At Park City Mountain, the crew focused on building piles this year, identifying areas with key elements to the resort operations that were high risk for a wildfire, said Vanhouten. These areas are Silverload, Quicksilver and Miners Campus.
“We’ve had two lightning strike fires in there in the last probably seven years. Small ones, but we’ve had dead trees hit by lightning. … So we figured we’d shift some of these fuels mitigation efforts in that zone,” said Vanhouten.
They built around 100 piles in those zones, nd plan to burn them in the spring.
With 7,300 acres at Park City Mountain, and 2,026 acres of Deer Valley, their respective 12-person and 10-person crews stay busy. Also, partnerships with neighboring HOAs and the city help.
With Park City Municipal’s ownership of Treasure Hill, Park City Mountain teams have worked closely with Alpine Forestry and Heinrich Deters, the city’s open space manager, to help coordinate burn days.
Controlled burns were conducted mid-November on Treasure Hill between the Creole and Kings Crown ski trails of Park City Mountain.
David Jackson/Park Record
In the past several years, Park City Mountain and The Colony have pooled their efforts, said Vanhouten. Resort crews would do the saw work, then The Colony’s crew would use their chipper to spread the chips.
Chipping isn’t always the best option, said Vanhouten, with access and cost barriers, and they’ve also noticed it can hamper their winter operations.
“What we find is that if we have a big pile of chps on the ground in the winter, because it harbors so much heat as the material’s breaking down, it melts the snow,” he said.
Deer Valley has at least 30 HOAs flanking their property, said Schlaepfer. For the most part, the residents supported the mitigation efforts, and the resort has sometimes burned their piles for them.
“We’ve been able to tell the story pretty well to our guests, and usually communicate with homeowners in the area so that they understand what’s happening, and they’re usually pretty supportive of it considering that their homes are also in the same areas,” Schlaepfer said.
In the future, Deer Valley has considered having a biochar kiln available as a drop-off location for the biomass produced by these communities and homeowners, said Schlaepfer. Then the material can be burnt to create biochar, a carbon-rich soil additive.
Both the resorts said they’re dedicated to maintaining forest health.
At Park City Mountain, they have seen some impact of the beetle infetation, but also just inherited problems from the town’s history.
“A lot of things were wiped out a long time ago for logging, for mining. And so what we found is things have grown back to a pretty homogenous forest, which is not ideal for forest health and everything’s the same age,” said Vanhouten.
Thinning efforts are therefore considerate of what would be best for the forest ecology and animal habitats, he said.
“We’re not just blanket wiping everything out. We’re thinking about all the different angles on it,” he said, explaining their close communication with the U.S. Forest Service and forest health experts.
Deer Valley has the same mentality, and plans to follow the same practices with their 3,700 acre ski terrain expansion.
“Pile burning helps us to not only mitigate wildfires, but manage our forest health. As a resort, we want to make sure that we’re being good stewards of our environment since we are private landowners,” said Schlaepfer.
Ultimately, these efforts alsobenefit ski quality, said Vanhouten.
“Selfishly, it definitely helps the skiing. If you go through these zones after we’ve gone through with our crew, it opens everything up. It’s a healthier forest. It’s better for (fuels mitigation) and it’s a fantastic ski product,” said Vanhouten.
Three birds with one stone, and they’ve seen good support for these efforts.
“People recognize the importance of it, the need for it, and then fortunately, most people in town enjoy the benefits in the winter too. So it’s like a year round, win-win,” he said.
The resorts said they plan to continue their pile burning efforts in the spring, around April, when ski season comes to a close.
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