What’s in a name? For Utah’s ski resorts, quite a bit.

The pine branch came off, and Omar’s ear nearly with it.

Fifteen years ago, a man nicknamed Omar was part of a crew tasked with clearing a new expert run that dropped into Powder Mountain’s Cobabe Canyon. He was using an extended pole saw to cut away pine boughs when one fell on him, nearly severing his ear. Not one to make a fuss, though, Omar wrapped his injury with a handkerchief and joined the other workers for lunch. When they saw the bloody, makeshift bandage, they insisted on rushing Omar to a hospital.

He got 15 stitches … and a trail (Omar’s Ear) named in his honor.

Trail maps at Utah resorts are scribbled through with creative, often whimsical, choices of runs and lifts for skiers and snowboarders to explore. A Brighton boarder might find herself cruising through Candyland. A skier at Eagle Point can fly down Anasazi Freefall. And a family at Deer Valley Resort could explore the Ruins of Pompeii. The state has, in fact, roughly a thousand named trails and 173 lifts with very few repeat names among them.

So how do ski areas go about naming their lifts and runs? The answer, like the resorts, varies greatly. Some methodically plot them out, vetting ideas through marketing teams and any number of corporate suits. Others prefer a more scattershot approach, throwing options at a snowbank to see what sticks. And sometimes, as in the case of Omar’s Ear, the perfect name almost drops right into their lap.

But what happens when, rather than the dozen or so new trails that typically accompany a new lift, a resort needs 10 times that many? That’s the sort of impossible task Susie English, Deer Valley’s vice president of marketing, found herself facing last summer.

In August 2023, seemingly overnight, the Park City ski area wrapped up five years of negotiations to expand onto 3,700 acres of neighboring land. The acquisition will nearly triple Deer Valley’s size, adding 120 new runs and 16 new lifts to its cache. Never has a Utah resort had to name as many lifts and trails at one time. And with the first phase of the expansion scheduled to open next month and trail signs to be printed, the runs and lifts needed to be named posthaste.

“Honestly,” acknowledged English, who has worked for Deer Valley for more than a decade, “it felt a little daunting to even get started.”

No satisfaction

The origins of some trail names are the stuff of folktales.

There’s Omar’s Ear. Then, there’s the naming of Snowbird’s Hot Foot Gully as relayed in a Ski Utah article by John Stratton, one of the resort’s original ski patrollers.

Stratton and other patrollers were performing avalanche control after a big storm in February 1975. One of the places they threw charges (hand-tossed packets of TNT) was Peruvian Gulch. After they cleared the area, Stratton returned to ski it and slid right over an undetonated charge. It exploded underneath him, blowing him out of his skis. Somehow, Stratton escaped without injury, but he did have a good idea for a trail name: Hot Foot Gully.

Most mountains have at least a few runs named after people who have made great sacrifices, bodily or temporally, for the betterment of the ski area. That’s the norm at Nordic Valley, where employees dubbed an expert trail Great Odin’s Raven. It’s also standard practice at Beaver Mountain, the nation’s oldest family-operated ski area.

“Harry’s Dream lift was named after my grandpa Harry Seeholzer,” current GM Travis Seeholzer said. “The lift was completed a year after his death. [It] was always his dream to have a lift to the top of the mountain.”

When trail names are needed by the dozens, though, most resorts rely on a unifying idea.

“When you name anything, it’s easier to have some sort of theme,” English said. “It gives you some parameters.”

Off Brighton’s Great Western Express lift, for instance, skiers will find an Old West motif with trails dubbed Silver Spur and Desperado. Trails named Roulette and Hard Times are part of Brian Head’s Las Vegas through line that nods to the origin of many of its visitors. The runs and lifts below Park City Mountain’s Cloud Dine lodge, meanwhile, are all dream-adjacent.

Other themes are more rock ‘n’ roll: Before it became Eagle Point, Elk Meadows operators named the trails at the Beaver-area ski hill after classic rock songs. Think Stairway to Heaven, Born to be Wild and Crocodile Rock. When the new operators took over in 2009, they left a couple in place, including Satisfaction and Vertigo. The others were rechristened with names reflective mostly of landmarks, loved ones and college mascots.

Still, Deer Valley’s problem was unique. It needed a list of names it could draw from — or perhaps mine is a more accurate term — more than a hundred times. Michael O’Malley, one of Deer Valley’s mountain hosts, knew just where to dig.

‘This is gold!’

O’Malley has given hundreds of tours centered around Deer Valley’s mining history since becoming one of the resort’s mountain hosts in 2007. A member of Park City Museum’s Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History, he’s about as close to an expert as can be found.

“I was chock-full of historical information” when he started, O’Malley said. “But I learned over time that a little bit of history goes a long way.”

Then Deer Valley’s parent company, Alterra Mountain Resorts, agreed to lease the land where the Mayflower Resort was being built above Jordanelle Reservoir. O’Malley saw an opportunity to share his knowledge. The resort had used a mining theme when designating trails on its original terrain. Why wouldn’t it extend that out to the expanded terrain?

Consulting three maps made between 1893 and 1932, O’Malley compiled a list of 700 to 800 mining claims in Summit and Wasatch counties. Most of them were established under what is now Deer Valley and Park City Mountain, where prospectors were seeking veins of silver, copper, gold, zinc and lead. Yet O’Malley said only about 20% of them actually produced minerals.

“The rest,” he said, borrowing a phrase from Park City mining historian Keith Droste, “nothing came out of them but hard work.”

After removing those already being used by Deer Valley or by Park City Mountain as well as the obviously “raunchier ones,” O’Malley handed English a list of about 500 potential trail and lift names.

Upon seeing the tally, English declared, “This is gold!”

English’s small group of Deer Valley trail name designators included mountain operations Vice President Steve Graff and Director Garrett Lang as well as communications chief Emily Summers — people English said knew the mountain better than anyone. With the list in hand, they began parsing through it and pulling out claims that both caught their attention and met certain criteria. The claim name had to make sense in terms of Deer Valley’s terrain and brand.

“If we had any question at all, we did a bunch of research,” English said. “Some we had to cross off the list pretty quickly once we did. We don’t want to redo this.”

A candidate also had to be relatively easy to say in case ski patrol got a call on the radio to respond to an emergency in that area.

“The funniest thing is that a couple of the ski patrollers looked at the list and said, ‘Please, no more ‘silvers’ and no more ‘littles.’ We’ve got enough,’” O’Malley said. “‘We don’t need to confuse things any more.’”

Once it had a working list, the group rolled out the map and began assigning names to lifts and trails. They started by doling out the strongest options to lifts. The next catchiest ones went to trails that served as main arteries.

“We know what marquee runs are going to be. The big, strong [runs],” English said. “We tried to name those first with names that are stronger and easier to remember.”

They worked their way out from there. Whenever possible, they would try to keep a trail close to the mining claim of the same name. Still, some designations came more naturally than others. The most prominent characteristic on Pay Rock, for example, is a rock. Hellcat and Rebellion are black-diamond runs.

Occasionally the group created a theme within a theme. The Neptune Express, for instance, will lead to trails such as Minnow and Nettie, both beginner runs. Off of Pinyon Express, a mostly beginner-serving lift that will open this winter, skiers can find both Humbug and Straddle Bug.

Some exceptions to the mining theme were made.

One notable one is the name of the lift that will serve as a main conduit between the new terrain and the original. Keetley Express, a six-person bubble lift, stretches from the ski beach at East Village to Keetley Point — formerly known as Sultan’s Nose. The lift and now the point carry the name of a ghost town that was submerged by Jordanelle Reservoir. Hailstone, another submerged town, has been pegged as the name of a future East Village lift.

And, breaking from tradition, a few trails will serve as an homage to a person. English said that’s rare for Deer Valley, which can count on one glove the number of runs it named for people in the original terrain. On the east side, however, skiers will find the expert run Deep Enuf alongside a gladed area named Well Timbered. Together they form the signature sign-off for Droste, the former superintendent of the Mayflower mine for whom that side of the mountain was originally named. English said another run will honor Bob Wheaton, Deer Valley’s longtime president who this year was inducted into the Will and Jean Pickett Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame.

Plenty of people offered to help the resort name the trails and lifts. Some offered to pay to have a run named after themselves or a loved one.

“We have people ask all the time,” English said, “especially now.”

But English said to her knowledge that has never happened. Even the Trump trail, a main corridor through the original terrain, carries the name of a mining claim, not a mogul. So does Lady Morgan.

Resort employees, and potentially the public, could be invited to provide input and ideas for trail names further into the process. Even after the initial effort by English’s group, some 35 designated trails and numerous glades remain nameless.

Skiers are expected to get their first peek at three new lifts, 20 new trails — 14 of which have snowmaking — and 300 acres of new terrain in late December, conditions permitting. Deer Valley plans to open another 250 acres on the east side if enough natural snow falls to coat the area.

English feels better about where the resort is at now than she was a year ago. She estimates that out of the 116 planned trails, some 80 have names. Some of those have trail signs.

And so far, no one has lost an ear.

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