While skiing was typically considered to be a form of transportation prior to the 20th century, skiing as sport caught on in the West in the 1920s and ’30s. Thousands of people came up Parleys Canyon each winter to watch ski jumping events at Ecker Hill, and Frog Valley — also called Deer Valley — was the 1936 site of Park City’s first winter carnival, which drew over 500 people who took the “ski train” up Parleys Canyon to attend the event.
Skiing became so popular in the ’30s that dozens of federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) projects focused on cutting ski trails and building warming huts in Utah. Near the Ontario Mine in Frog Valley, a WPA crew cleared several runs for “walk-up- and-ski-down” skiing.
After returning from World War II, two Park City locals, Otto Carpenter and Bob Burns, got tired of driving all the way to Alta and Brighton to ski lift-served runs. So, they gathered funding to develop the WPA runs near the Ontario Mine into lift-served skiing. The duo leased the surface rights from the mining company and named the area Snow Park Ski Area.
Bob, who was a machinist for Judge Mine, built Snow Park’s original T-bar using scavenged mining equipment and as many new parts as they could afford. The lift was powered with a Ford Model A engine and opened in 1946.
Each day started with an assembly line of helpers — often kids recruited from the ski school — who could take the first “chair” of the day in exchange for helping transport gasoline to the motor installed at the top of the lift.