Park City Mountain Resort is now simply ‘Park City’
New brand unveiled as Vail Resorts combines two properties
The Park Record
Jay Hamburger
07/31/2015
People planning to ski or snowboard at the resorts widely known as Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort next winter will simply be headed to Park City.
PCMR officials on Wednesday introduced a widely anticipated rebranding of the two properties, which will be linked into a single resort by the start of the ski season in November. The resort said the combined property will be referred to as Park City. Park City Mountain Resort, though, will remain the official name even as the resort is marketed as Park City.
The announcement was made at Legacy Lodge in front of a large crowd of resort representatives, the business community, fans of the resort and a few City Hall officials.
The event was a celebration marking the rebranding, complete with live music, samples of resort menu items and a promotional video.
“There’s only one place like Park City,” Bill Rock, the chief operating officer of the resort, told the crowd of several hundred, mentioning snow, the proximity to the Salt Lake airport and the authentic nature of the Park City community.
The simple name is a result of a complicated set of circumstances that led to Colorado-based Vail Resorts acquiring PCMR in 2014. The event was scheduled as work proceeds on an ambitious set of improvements that will link PCMR and Canyons Resort into one property. The resort will spread through more than 7,300 acres, making it the largest in the United States.
Colorado-based Vail Resorts owns PCMR and operates Canyons Resort as part of a long-term agreement with the Talisker corporate family.
Linking the two properties was the priority when Vail Resorts acquired PCMR in a deal that also settled a bitterly contested lawsuit centered on the former PCMR owner’s lease of Talisker land. Vail Resorts executives outlined the broad idea of linking the properties at the time of the PCMR acquisition. Details were made public over the following months as Vail Resorts secured the necessary permits from government panels in Park City and the Snyderville Basin.
Resort officials on Wednesday, meanwhile, announced the gondola will be called Quicksilver, a name meant to convey the speed of the gondola and harken back to Park City’s silver-mining days. It had been referred to as the Interconnect Gondola in recent months. The gondola will carry eight people per cabin from the bottom of the Silverlode lift on the PCMR terrain to the Flatiron lift at the Canyons Resort terrain, covering 7,650 feet or nearly 1 ½ miles. The ride will last between 8 1/2 minutes and nine minutes.
They also said the name of a new restaurant at the base of the gondola close to the Silverlode lift will be Miners Camp. The restaurant had been called Snow Hut for years. The new restaurant will accommodate more people than the older one. Miners Camp and the gondola are seen as the most important upgrades in Vail Resorts’ $50 million in upgrades planned in anticipation of the upcoming ski season.
The resort unveiled a new logo that uses the name Park City and a Canyons Resort marking that resembles the infinity symbol. It is red, the primary color of PCMR, rather than orange that had been used by Canyons Resort.
The crowd was told the base at the former Canyons Resort will be called Canyons Village. Staff uniforms will be the same across the combined property and the slogan ‘I Ride Park City’ will remain. The website for the property is parkcitymountain.com. The canyonsresort.com website loads to parkcitymountain.com. A new trail map was introduced.
In an interview, Rock explained the idea of marketing the resort as Park City rather than Park City Mountain Resort. He said people see the destination as Park City.
“Park City Mountain Resort is the official name of the business. But, you know, people out in the world, when they think about where are they going to go ski, they say I’m going to ski in Park City. And everybody knows Park City is one. That’s why we said there’s only one. There’s one destination,” Rock said.
