Snowpine Lodge

Snowpine Lodge

At the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon, forty minutes by road from downtown Salt Lake City, Alta has spent most of a century refusing to become Park City, which makes Snowpine Lodge, the town’s first luxury hotel, a slightly awkward proposition on paper and a more interesting one in person. The building began as a granite structure from Alta’s silver-mining years, became a general store and post office in the late 1870s, took the Snowpine name and its first skiers in the late 1930s, and by 2011, when Brent and Meg Pratt bought it, was a 34-room economy lodge with creaking stairs. The Pratts, whose Alta connection runs back to Brent’s great-great-grandfather Swen Nielson, a Swedish emigrant who worked the Emma and Bay City mines as a teenager, spent around $50 million rebuilding it, and the new lodge opened in January 2019 at six levels and 70,000 square feet, with 54 rooms and suites plus 14 bunk rooms that keep faith with Alta’s long dormitory tradition. Their daughter, Courtney Pratt, designed it around the original stone walls, and the family still owns it, with Pivot, part of Davidson Hospitality, brought in to run it. Inside, the palette is browns, greys and white linen, with framed mountain prints, L’Occitane products and a humidifier in every room, which at this altitude matters more than the thread count. Swen’s, the main restaurant, is named for the great-great-grandfather, who appears in a wall-sized painting by the Utah artist Julie Rogers, and it runs an open kitchen behind floor-to-ceiling windows, with communal and private tables and a seasonal menu that leans on regional produce. The Gulch Pub handles après with cocktails and live music. Below, the Stillwell Spa, named for the Emma Mine manager who later kept the general store, has six treatment rooms, a sauna, a steam room, an oxygen bar and a grotto with a plunge pool set against the building’s original granite. Outside there is a heated pool and two hot tubs facing the canyon, and inside a games room called The Nest, a children’s centre, a small cinema and the only ballroom in Alta. The luxury here is mostly a matter of logistics, and it is very good logistics: ski lockers with boot dryers, a lift built in 2018 that carries you from the lodge onto the mountain, and the Albion base, home to the ski school, a short slide away. The rooms themselves are compact, most of them under 320 square feet, so what you are paying for is position, a spa that earns its place on a storm day, and a dining room that is better than anything else at the top of the canyon. It suits multi-generational ski families above all, the kind where grandparents want a massage, teenagers want pool and ping-pong, and someone needs to be on first chair. It reads as a family’s house that grew, which, given the history, is roughly what it is. You should not come if you snowboard, because Alta remains one of the few ski areas in America that does not allow it, or if you want nightlife, a vast room, or the hush of an adults-only retreat, because there will be children in the corridors and a game of pool going on upstairs. You should also know that when the canyon road closes for avalanche control, Alta goes into Interlodge and guests are kept indoors, sometimes for hours. You should come if you are serious about skiing some of the deepest snow in the Wasatch, if you are travelling with people of different ages and stamina levels, and if you would trade a grand suite for being on the hill before anyone driving up from Salt Lake has parked. The short version: A rebuilt 1870s mining building at the base of Alta, owned by the Pratt family since 2011 and reopened in 2019 with 54 rooms and suites, 14 bunk rooms, its own lift, a granite-walled spa and a restaurant named after an ancestor who worked the mines.