A parking lot that has become a paradise for Utah skiers and snowboarders is about to be paved over.
Construction of a three-tiered parking structure on the Cabriolet lot at Canyons Village is set to begin Monday, Park City Mountain announced this week. In the short term, the disruption will lead to reduced parking in the dirt lot near State Route 224. In the long term, the garage could spell the demise of one of the few free, first-come-first-served ski lots left in the Wasatch Mountains.
The rudimentary lot has served as the main access to the Canyons Village since long before Vail Resorts bought the mountain and combined it with Park City Mountain, creating the largest lift-accessed ski resort in the United States. Yet even as most other Wasatch ski resorts have turned to both charging for parking and requiring reservations — including around Park City Mountain Village — the Cabriolet lot has remained free and easily accessible.
Parking there will continue to be free — albeit limited to roughly half its current capacity — through the end of this ski season (tentatively set for April 21) and throughout the 2025-26 season. During that time, carpools of four or more will be able to park in Lot 4 in the Upper Village parking, near the lifts and shops. When the Cabriolet lot fills, vehicles will be directed to other lots, some of which require taking a shuttle.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Vehicles, seen here in Park City on Friday, March 14, 2025, fill the parking lot at Canyons Village ahead of construction of a new, three-story parking structure to be built in the Cabriolet lot.
The Cabriolet lot will be closed throughout this summer. If everything goes according to schedule, the garage will open during the 2025-26 season. That should coincide with the opening of the new Sunrise Gondola, which will deliver guests from lodging in the Canyons Village base to near the Red Pine Lodge.
“We recognize that it’s a little bit of an inconvenience,” Park City Mountain spokesperson John Kanaly said of the spring parking reduction. “We’re going out of our way to open up these other lots to keep things flowing as smooth as possible.”
Once built, the structure will offer two entrances. Both will be located off of Ozzy Way, which currently serves as the access road to the Cabriolet lot. Vehicles will be able to park on the top two tiers. The bottom level, meanwhile, will feature a transit plaza with a bus stop as well as a pedestrian plaza with shops.
The structure is slated to have 1,850 parking stalls, Kanaly said. That accounts for all the current public parking at Canyons Village. After completion of the garage, the upper village lots are expected to be made available for development by TCFC Finance, which owns most of the land in and around Canyons Village. Parking garages at Canyons Village hotels, such as the Pendry, will not be affected.
“This is a project all done by TCFC,” Kanaly said. “So those are their lots to do with what they want.”
(Julie Jag | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Cabriolet Lift on the Canyons side of Park City Mountain Resort takes a patron back to the parking lot on March 13, 2020. Face masks and social distancing are likely to be required on lifts and around the resort when it reopens this winter.
The lingering question, however, is whether Park City Mountain will require parking reservations or paid parking in the once-freewheeling lot.
A press release detailing Park City Mountain’s vision for the project said it “will increase carpooling and reduce congestion, while positively impacting traffic throughout the region.” The release also highlights the benefits the resort has seen since implementing parking changes at its Mountain Village base in the heart of Park City in 2022-23. Those changes included requiring daily, paid reservations at all of its surface lots until 1 p.m., after which parking was free. It costs $28 to park at those lots — Main, First Time and Silver King — this season. Carpools of four people or more are free.
Kanaly did not rule out the use of reservations at Canyons, but said the resort is making those decisions season by season.
“We have received good feedback on the reservation system,” he said. “... For next season, we anticipate it being a combination of the reservation, the carpooling, free parking, and certainly free public transit.”
The structure, Kanaly said, is designed to nudge guests to take advantage of Park City’s free public transit as well as ridesharing.
“This whole structure is really going to, ideally, make it easier to arrive to the resort through carpooling and public transit. There will be a nice drop off center that is going to be a great improvement,” he said. “So we really want to start the community taking advantage of some of those resources.”
On Friday, the Utah Department of Transportation announced it had selected a plan for easing congestion at the intersection of Interstate 80 and SR 224, about 3.5 miles from Canyons Village. The plan calls for adding extra lanes to the highway and the interstate on and off ramps.
More and more Utah ski and snowboard areas have turned to reservations and paid parking in recent years to manage traffic congestion. Solitude Mountain Resort broke the seal in 2019 when it began charging for parking in its lots. Now three of the four Cottonwood Canyons resorts require paid reservations on weekend mornings, with Snowbird being the outlier. This season, Powder Mountain became the first Ogden Valley resort to charge for parking on weekends.
Prior to the change at Park City Mountain’s Mountain Village in 2022-23, none of the three Wasatch Back resorts charged for parking nor required reservations. After next winters, free parking at a resort is likely to be a luxury.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Parking lots for the Snow Park Lodge at Deer Valley on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2023.
In addition to the potential changes at Canyons Village, Deer Valley Resort is set to begin construction of its own parking structure at its main Snow Park base this summer. The resort will charge for parking in the four-story, underground structure upon its completion, which is scheduled for 2030. The Park City Planning Commission mandated Deer Valley charge for parking in the garage when it issued the project’s conditional use permit last month. The commission has also asked Deer Valley to consider implementing a reservation system.
Construction will cut parking at Snow Park roughly in half through the 2025-26 ski season, according to a report by KPCW. The report said the number of stalls is expected to drop to 400 — or a quarter of the area’s current capacity — during the 2026-27 ski season.
However, parking at the new Deer Valley East Village, off of highway 189, and at Woodward Park City along I-80 are expected to remain free — for now.
