Little Mountain Ski Area

Little Mountain Ski Area sat at the summit of Emigration Canyon, about nine miles east of Salt Lake City, on the saddle between Emigration and Parleys Canyons. The 1847 pioneer wagon road crossed the same pass on its way down into the Salt Lake Valley.

Ray Watrous and Mel Henshaw started the hill. In August 1946 they asked Salt Lake City for a lease near Little Mountain for two rope tows, a shelter and a power plant for floodlights, and they also secured a Forest Service lease. They cleared the slope, planted grass to hold it, and ran their first season in the winter of 1946-47. Skiers came out at night under floodlights while a loudspeaker played polkas and Strauss waltzes, and about 5,000 people skied there that first winter.

Cal McPhie took over in 1950 and ran Little Mountain for about eighteen years, and for a time Lou Lorenz directed its ski school. It stayed small and friendly to beginners: by the late 1960s it had a 500-foot open slope with a 76-foot vertical rise, two rope tows, a warming hut with a snack bar, and night skiing six evenings a week. In 1968 the Deseret News said Little Mountain had pioneered the idea of night skiing. Sledders used the slopes beside it.

The tows ran for the last time in the 1967-68 season. That fall McPhie opened a larger area just over Parleys Summit, and Little Mountain stayed closed. In September 1971 a fire leveled the ski house and cafe at what the Salt Lake Tribune called the old Little Mountain Ski Resort.