Last July, if you rode up Sterling Express at Deer Valley, you got out at the top and turned around. No bike option. Hiking and scenic rides only, while beneath your feet crews cut new ski runs into terrain that used to carry Tidal Wave and Holy Roller, two of the mountain's most ridden trails. Roughly half the bike park sat closed for the entire season, a casualty of the resort's East Village terrain expansion that doubled Deer Valley's skiable acreage over the winter.
This summer, that same lift is back to bikes. All three, Silver Lake Express, Homestake Express, and Sterling Express, are running mountain bikers again for the first time since 2024. Deer Valley's Vice President of Skier Services, Rob Sogard, put the shift plainly on KPCW's Local News Hour in June: last year the resort was operating at about half capacity with the upper mountain closed, and this year the goal was simply to get everybody back out there. If you live near the mountain and have been waiting for the trail system to feel whole again, this is the summer it does.
What Actually Closed, and Why
The construction wasn't cosmetic. Deer Valley's mountain bike trail supervisor, Dan Ward, has run the crew for 15 years, and he described 2025 as a rebuilding project as much as a construction season. Excavators and chainsaws carved new ski runs across terrain that also carried bike trails, which meant crews had to wait until the winter infrastructure was finalized before they could even assess what remained. Some of it wasn't a matter of reopening a gate. On the Tidal Wave trail, the ski run construction eliminated an entire quarter mile of the meadow section, forcing the crew to redesign and rebuild features from scratch rather than simply clear brush and reopen a familiar line.
That distinction matters if you're riding this summer expecting the exact trail you remember from 2023 or 2024. Bike patrol trail worker Deacan Spierling described the spring reopening process as waking the trails from hibernation, smoothing berms and shaping jumps by hand on Tsunami before opening day. The name on the trail map hasn't changed. The dirt underneath it has.
"This is a massive project, and our main goal this year is to resurrect some of the trails that have been damaged due to new ski runs going in." — Dan Ward, Deer Valley mountain bike trail supervisor
Which Lift Is Yours Again
If you've organized your riding routine around whichever lift happened to be open the past two summers, it's worth remapping now that all three are back in service.
- Silver Lake Express runs from the base of the resort and has stayed the most consistent access point through the construction years. It's still the easiest starting point if you're riding from a Deer Valley Village or Silver Lake-area address.
- Homestake Express, mid-mountain, now serves the newer beginner flow trail Ripple on Bald Eagle Mountain, alongside longer-standing green and blue terrain. This is also where riders looking for the quieter progression route Secret of My Success start out, a short trail that many longtime locals still don't know exists.
- Sterling Express, mid-mountain, is the lift that spent all of last summer restricted to hiking and scenic rides. Its return to full bike access is the single biggest functional change for anyone who rides Deer Valley regularly, since it reopens direct access to rebuilt sections of Tidal Wave and Holy Roller.
The resort's roughly 60 miles of lift-served trail also tie into Park City's much larger connected singletrack network, so a Deer Valley lap can turn into a much longer ride without ever loading your bike into a car.
The Wednesday Habit, and Its Last Night
One of the more useful shifts for anyone treating this as a season, not a single visit, is the return of the Twilight Ride Series. From June 24 through August 19, Deer Valley has kept Silver Lake Express, Sterling Express, and Homestake Express spinning until 8 p.m. on Wednesday evenings, well past the standard 6 p.m. close. It's built for exactly the after-work rhythm that shapes a lot of Deer Valley summers: leave the office, be on the lift by five, be down before dark.
This Wednesday, August 19, is the final night of the series for 2026. After that, the mountain reverts to standard daily hours, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. through September 7, then weekends only through the September 20 close of the summer season.
One procedural note if you haven't ridden yet this summer: Deer Valley introduced a new requirement this year, the Deer Valley Pedal Pass, which anyone entering the bike park now needs alongside a signed waiver. The revenue is earmarked for trail maintenance, bike patrol, and the kind of daily crew work that kept Tsunami rideable this season.
One More Reason to Watch September
The rebuild has already attracted attention beyond the neighborhood. Deer Valley was recently named host of the Fox US Open of Mountain Biking, the final stop on the US National Mountain Bike Championship series, running September 11 through 13 on Bald Eagle Mountain. Three days of competition will cover everything from pro-level racing to youth and adaptive athlete categories, a notable vote of confidence in a bike park that spent the prior year at half capacity.
For residents, it's a useful marker for how the rest of the season will feel. Trail crews estimated that roughly 90 percent of the terrain was approaching readiness by mid-May, well ahead of past years, thanks to a lighter snowpack and an early start on spring maintenance. That head start is part of why the full three-lift, full-trail lineup came together in time for a June opening instead of trickling in piece by piece through July, the way reopenings after major construction sometimes do.
If you've spent the past two summers riding around construction fencing and mentally filing this as a temporary inconvenience, this is the season to update that file. The mountain isn't promising the old trail system back exactly as it was. It's delivering a rebuilt one, tested jump by jump, that happens to carry the same names you already know.
Between the reopened Sterling Express access, the last Twilight Ride of the year this Wednesday, and a national mountain bike championship arriving on Bald Eagle Mountain next month, it's a good late-summer stretch to be riding out your own front door instead of reading about someone else's season on a trail forum.
If Deer Valley is more than a season for you, whether you're already living the rhythm of Wednesday twilight rides and lift-served laps, or you're weighing what it would mean to make this mountain the one you ride from home, Park City | Deer Valley - Estates can walk you through what ownership in this neighborhood actually looks like day to day. Let's Connect.
