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Posted Dec 13, 2022, 2:27 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Central Metro/East - Park City - Mayflower Resort - March/April 2022, Including Latest October/November 2022 Updates
September/October 2020: Excerpts by Alexander Cramer for the Park Record - ...With all the hubbub about growth and development surrounding the Jordanelle Reservoir, the mountains that overlook its western flank seem unmoved...It’s at the base of the mountain where any hint of the future for these hills sits. It’s there that a new 1.2-million-gallon water tank is buried, construction vehicles sit near freshly turned earth and the infrastructure for some of the planned Mayflower Mountain Resort has been laid.
A little over a year ago, developers announced ambitious plans at the site for what they called the first brand-new ski resort to be developed in the United States in 40 years. Sitting on the eastern flank of Deer Valley Resort, Mayflower Mountain Resort was the product of a partnership between New York real estate magnate Gary Barnett and a Utah development agency that was created to solve jurisdictional problems related to military installations and grew large enough to swallow thousands of acres in the Wasatch Back. Plans called for a half-dozen ski lifts, three hotels, 1,560 residential units and 250,000 square feet of commercial space...At a site visit Monday, much had been done in the past few months that wasn’t immediately visible, and that the flurry of activity laid the groundwork for the project to go forward. Brooke Hontz, vice president of development at EX Utah Development, LLC, said the COVID-19 pandemic had knocked the project sideways, like it did many industries, effectively pausing work for a month and shifting its priorities and timeline.But the project has undergone meaningful administrative transformations and improvements, according to Hontz and Kurt Krieg, senior vice president of development at EX Utah Development, LLC, the Utah-based arm of the Extell Development Company. For skiers, that means the ski lifts are now estimated to be turning in time for the 2023-2024 ski season. Last year, Krieg said the hope was for the resort to open for skiing for the 2021-2022 season and for the first hotel to open in the spring of 2022. Now, Krieg said the goal is to start vertical construction of the first hotel in the spring. That is planned to be a 12-story, 615,000-square-foot facility that includes 388 rooms and 55 condos in addition to commercial and conference space. Krieg said it will be designed to be able to hold large-scale conferences, like trade shows for military groups. It will be big enough for a car or a tank or a boat to be put on display, he said. Of the 388 rooms, 100 will be set aside for members of the military. It’s those 100 rooms that make up the U.S. Air Force’s morale, welfare and recreation facility. Originally, the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, became involved in the project to build a facility for members of the military to get rest and relaxation near a Utah ski resort. Its charge was to replace a small ski chalet that was knocked down in the early 2000s.
MIDA has been instrumental in the development of the larger resort concept, with Barnett saying the project would not have happened without the financing options MIDA provides.
In late August, MIDA issued $68.5 million in bonds to finance the infrastructure for much of the planned resort. Krieg said that will pay for key infrastructure like water, sewer and roads.
Soon after the funding came through, MIDA approved a consolidated master plan for the area, providing a high-level look at how the resort will be built and uniting other various approvals, some of which dated back to the 1980s. The master plan calls for two distinct base areas, which are separated by a ridgeline. The Mayflower base area is where the conference hotel will be, while the so-called Pioche base area, just to the north, will feature single- and multi-family homes, a boutique hotel and other amenities.
Krieg said that master plan approval moved the project out of the legislative phase of approvals and into the administrative one, a wonky but important distinction that means that future governmental oversight will be limited to how, not whether, aspects of the project can be built.
Governmental oversight has come in strange forms for this project, with MIDA acting as a jurisdiction like a city or town but with a board of directors made up of officials from around the state.
MIDA has land-use authority for much of the project, though the project is in Wasatch County. The resort area has swelled to 6,800 acres, some 10.5 square miles. Standing on a ridgeline with the various planned ski trails cascading down around her, Hontz extended her arm over a nearby hill and pointed west, saying the property extended about 4 miles to Guardsman Pass...Hontz portrayed the future resort as skier-friendly, and designed chiefly for the skiing experience. She said that homes will not rise above a certain elevation level, contrasting it with the ski-in/ski-out mansions in The Colony, in which skiers at the Canyons Village side of Park City Mountain Resort meander through multi-million dollar homes. Instead, the homes at Mayflower will be lower down and closer to the planned ski village.
The developers have been working with two consulting groups to prepare skier operation programs. SE Group, based in Colorado, designed the resort’s ski trails and is working on resort programming like a ski school, ski patrol, ski rental systems and restaurants. 4240 Architecture, based in Denver, is working on the architectural components, designing the buildings and lodges. Mayflower Mountain Resort has long been envisioned as the eastern portal to Deer Valley Resort, and last year secured an agreement with Deer Valley that allows users to access terrain there through Mayflower’s infrastructure. That means that skiers could use the Mayflower base area and take a lift up into Deer Valley’s terrain, skiing there for the day as long as they have a Deer Valley ski pass. Barnett has said he envisions the two resorts operating together, and Krieg reiterated Monday that would be the ideal arrangement...Wasatch County officials have said that, in approving aspects of the resort, they anticipated it would be operated to the same standard as Deer Valley, which has garnered a worldwide reputation for service and amenities.
Kurt Krieg, a senior vice president with the company developing Mayflower Mountain Resort, describes the infrastructure projects
that will soon be installed on the site just west of the Jordanelle Reservoir as Brooke Hontz looks on. Krieg estimated lifts will start turning at the resort in 2023. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)
March, 2021
Progress on Mayflower Mountain Resort continues.
Work has continued this winter on the planned Mayflower Mountain Resort beyond the eastern border of Deer Valley Resort, with nearly $70 million worth of infrastructure installed and another $100 million to pay for things like road retaining walls, sewer pipe and snowmaking infrastructure.
Updates, October/November 2021
Mayflower Mountain Resort is anticipated to generate 4,000 daily visits
Alexander Cramer for the Park Record - https://www.parkrecord.com/news/summ...-daily-visits/
With a fresh quarter-billion dollars in the bank, foundations dug into the earth and timber framings rising into the air, Mayflower Mountain Resort continues to progress on the eastern flank of Deer Valley.
And while the weekend’s expected snowfall is exciting for some local skiers, it’ll be at least two years before they’re able to ride those slopes. In the meantime, officials are planning for how the new resort will impact the area, recently revealing some preliminary numbers that give a sense of the project’s scope.
“We are looking at probably 4,000-plus visitors within the area daily. That would be more geared towards, obviously, our peak season,” said Heather Kruse, the area project manager for the Military Installation Development Authority, the state agency that controls thousands of acres around the Jordanelle Reservoir...
Progress continues on the Mayflower Mountain Resort as its impacts — 4,000 projected daily visitors in peak season — come into focus. Courtesy of EX Utah Development LLC
“We’ve got significant growth that’s coming into a very concentrated area. We just want to make sure that we are looking at it appropriately to help mitigate what could be potential traffic issues,” Kruse said in a subsequent interview. “We don’t want to not plan.”
She also told officials the resort will require an estimated 2,300 workers as its first stages are completed.
“We are also looking at employees and getting employees into the area, living there, commuting there and how are we going to plan for that as this comes to fruition,” she said.
Kruse said the teams are considering where to set up transit connections and how to ensure guests and workers can easily access the resort. She said officials are currently considering a dense, mixed-use development planned just across U.S. 40 from the resort as the site for a key transit center, with possible future transit connections to Heber or Park City.
As for housing workers on-site, two high-ranking officials with the New York-based development firm that is building the resort, Extell Development, said the resort would provide workforce housing for as many employees as possible.
Extell has established a Utah subsidiary called Ex Utah Development LLC. Its Senior Vice President of Development Kurt Krieg and Vice President of Development Brooke Hontz detailed recent improvements being made to the site and their strategy for housing workers.
They also said negotiations with Deer Valley Resort about operating Mayflower’s ski terrain remain unchanged, with no agreement in place. And they slightly updated a timeline for the resort’s opening, saying the resort was targeting a first connector lift to open in December 2023. That lift would access Deer Valley’s terrain as well as Mayflower trails, but the balance of the lifts and trails would likely open the following winter, in December 2024.
The five miles of hiking and biking trails are set to open next spring after being shut down recently to avoid conflicts between trail users and construction equipment on the mountain.
The development agreement requires 95,000 square feet of workforce housing, and the officials said about 9,500 of that is currently being used to build 17 workforce housing units.
Hontz said the resort would try to house as many employees as possible, but that it wouldn’t be home to every employee, some of whom will likely rather live elsewhere.
She and Krieg said the resort is planning to build a variety of employee housing styles. They said they weren’t ruling out dorm-style housing like what is being built at the Canyons Village base area, but the resort wouldn’t rely on that exclusively.
The 17 units under construction are one- and two-bedroom apartments as well as studios.
The first buildings expected to be completed at Mayflower Mountain Resort are apartments at what is called the Pioche base area, north of the main base. Officials anticipate the buildings will open next September. Courtesy of EX Utah Development LLC
Hontz said that a relatively small portion of the overall density in the resort core would be occupied by the resort’s employees.
A foundation has been dug for the cornerstone hotel at the resort’s base, known as the morale, welfare and recreation facility, which will be home to a block of 100 rooms reserved for U.S. Air Force service members.
That hotel, some 600,000 square feet in total, is slated to open in the spring of 2024. Another two hotels are in the works, including a high-end resort referred to as the five-star hotel, and a massive 1.6-million-square-foot skier services hotel. That’s the approximate size of the entire development sought at the Tech Center site, a new neighborhood proposed at Kimball Junction.
The first building to come online is expected to be open September 2022, part of a four-building project at the Pioche base area on the northern end of the resort.
Update - March/April 2022
The company also expects to open a new 5-mile trail on the mountain this summer.
“I think it’s at about 7,000 feet,” says Brooke Hontz, vice president of development for Extell Utah, the resort developer. It runs just above the village and dips into the valleys and comes back out onto the ridges, and then it’ll take off onto a north spur that does climb up to Spin Cycle. So, that’s one of our goals, is to get people onto our site but keep them safe. One of the challenges is connecting that down to the frontage road and having some parking without establishing a full trailhead.”
The development agreement requires Extell to develop 50 miles of trails in total.
Mayflower is an active construction site and no one is allowed on the site until the trails are completely built and officially opened to the public. That announcement will happen later this summer.
The company says the completed project, with about 3 million square feet of commercial and residential space, will compare in size to the Canyons area of Park City Mountain Resort.
According to Extell Senior Vice President of Development Kurt Krieg, the resort will build at least five ski lifts in its initial phases.
Other expanded aspects of the skiing - and potentially snowboarding - experience there depend on a partnership with a ski operator.
“We're working closely with our neighbors — that's Deer Valley — we hope to figure out a joint effort with them,” Krieg says. “At this point, we're still in the dialog and going back and forth on different elements. But we think it's productive, and it takes time, you have to remember that these are long term operation efforts, you know, talking 199 year lease plus. So it's just not doesn't just turn on a dime.”
At earliest, he says people could ski there next season, but the 2024 to 2025 winter is the more realistic target opening.
Another major element of the project is new access roads called “portals” to connect Highway 40 to the resort. Those are underpasses beneath the highway, which the Utah Department of Transportation is building.
Krieg says he expects UDOT to start connecting the portals to the resort frontage road and add other finishing touches this summer.
Krieg also expects 60 other homes in and around the Pioche Village, a subdivision area with hundreds of homes planned, to hit the market this summer.
One of the most elaborate parts of the Mayflower project is a military hotel and conference center. Krieg says the 13-story, 650,000 square foot building is about halfway finished after breaking ground last June. It’ll have 55 homes and almost 400 hotel rooms, with some areas reserved for members of the military.
April 26th - Developer to give update on Mayflower Mountain Resort
By Ben Lasseter/ kpcw.org. This afternoon, a state committee will meet to discuss the Mayflower Mountain Resort.
Kurt Krieg, a vice president of the firm developing the resort, told KPCW he’ll update the committee about construction on the ski beach and other progress. Plans originally touted what would be the largest ski beach in the world, a place for skiers and riders to soak up the sun after a day on the slopes.
The meeting is with the development review committee of the Military Installation Development Authority, commonly known as MIDA. MIDA is the overseeing authority of the project.
Also during the meeting, the committee will consider approving an amendment to the roads plan for the main village area.
For a link to attend the meeting by video conference, visit kpcw.org
May 3rd - May Updates on Mayflower Mountain Resort
The developer of the Mayflower Mountain Resort presented conceptual renderings of the base area village at a recent meeting.
Skiing at the Mayflower is still a couple years out, but the first phase of construction for six ski lifts has begun, and a gondola is being planned. This summer, crews will clear ground, build trails and prepare foundations for ski lift poles expected to go in next summer.
Vice President of Development for Extell Utah Kurt Krieg says plans for a base area village are also full steam ahead.
“This is designed to be a pedestrian-based village where you come and park your car,” he says. “You have everything in walking distance.”
In the day skier lot, 550 parking spots are paved and lined.
Included in future plans are a 159-room hotel, ski school, ski beach, and 70,000 square feet of retail, food and beverage space.
Krieg explains the central facility will be multi-level, with one plaza centered around shops and another on the same level as lifts.
The village area is planned to feature separate plazas on multiple levels.
Update - Eastern Metro - October/November 2022
Updates On America's Newest Mega Ski Resort
By Ian Wood, October/November 2022
During the 2024-25 season, a new ski resort will open in the United States for the first time since the 2000s. Located just outside of Park City, Mayflower Mountain is a massive development that when it’s fully built out, will feature two base villages, thirteen lifts, four new terrain pods, and much more. 4300 acres of skiable terrain will be available during the winter, with fifty miles and hiking and mountain biking trails during the offseason. With construction well underway, a lot of work is being done quickly. Here are the latest developments on Mayflower.
The interview came with a variety of interesting tidbits. The first was that the ski resort may not be known as Mayflower when it opens. This name was originally coined due to it being right next to Mayflower Mine Road. The operator of the ski resort will determine the name, whether snowboarders will be allowed, and other operational strategies. The runs will consist mostly of intermediate and advanced trail difficulty.
One of the big questions is who will operate the ski resort. Talks have been ongoing with Deer Valley for a while now, with it eventually being expected that the two sides reach an operational deal, making the development a massive expansion to Deer Valley Resort. Brooke Hontz said the following about the negotiations:
“We’ve been working with and talking to Deer Valley for quite some time, and we’re in advanced phases of making sure any potential dynamic partnership would behoove all stakeholders.”
In terms of the construction process, Brooke said that work on the property “will continue through this winter. You’re going to see a lot more at our Morale Welfare Recreation Hotel (MWR), which is also known as the Conference Hotel or the Air Force Hotel. It’s the two cranes that have been there all summer, sometimes three, sometimes four. We’re on floor five right now, and the efficient construction will continue until we start the exciting work on the interiors.”
There are three core tenants to this development: the wellness center, adventure center, and at-home treatment facilities. The wellness center will feature “cryotherapy; a hyperbaric chamber/pod; LightStem LED; floatation pool; nutrition programs for microbiome and biohacking; lymph drainage; IV therapy, thermal and contrast bathing; fitness training, yoga, meditation, sound baths, integrative medicine, cognitive health, and more.” Some of the amenities of the adventure center will include a large apres ski beach, outdoor pool, hot tub, full-service restaurant, and gear storage. Each home will have a sanctuary space, meaning they’ll have either a plunge pool, sauna, or steam room.
The project just broke ground, and the first homes are expected to be completed by Early 2024.
My Visit There: Back when I was visiting Utah in September, I decided to go up and check out the progress being made over on the mountain. I got to chat with Sheila Hall of Marcella at Mayflower, who helped to quash some of the misconceptions about the under-construction ski resort.
Some of the big concerns with locals involved how much water the property will use from the Jordanelle Reservoir. Sheila told me that the ski resort will have an extensive snowmaking network, with the most advanced technology. According to her, all this water usage will only result in using a fraction of one percent of the water in Jordanelle. Additionally, Sheila told me that 80% of the used water for snowmaking and other purposes will return to the Reservoir, so the effect on Jordanelle will be very minimal.
My view of the mountain is this:...Utah is in need of another ski resort, as the slopes have become jam-packed over the past decade. I see comments on many ski forums with people saying how there is a need for more ski resorts to be built. But when an actual property like this is planned, some are up in arms about it, in spite of the fact that this ski resort has been planned for this site for the past couple of decades. With other Utah ski resorts (outside of Powder Mountain and Deer Valley) not aiming for capacity limits, another ski resort should be welcomed to spread out the crowds, as it could help the exploding population of the Wasatch Front and residents of the growing Heber Valley area to have a local mountain.
Some photos of my trip to Mayflower are below:
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Last edited by delts145; Oct 27, 2023 at 5:34 PM.
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