Big & Little Cottonwood Canyons · Wasatch Mountains, Utah
Reclaim the Cottonwood Canyons.
These canyons belong to the public — not to a handful of ski resorts. It's time to ask the U.S. Forest Service to revoke their lease and open our mountains back up to everyone.
Two petitions. One goal: canyons for everyone, not just skiers.
Skiers queue for the tram at Snowbird — one of the busiest lift lines in North America.
Take back our canyons.
For decades, ski resorts have steadily expanded their footprint in the Cottonwood Canyons, crowding out nearly every other form of recreation these mountains can sustain.
The resorts don't own all of this land. We do. It's public land, leased to them by the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of every American.
It's time to ask the Forest Service to revoke that lease and restore the canyons to what they should be: open, wild, and shared.
Reclaiming this land would also unlock some of the most epic backcountry ski terrain in the world — no lift ticket required.
It's time we take back our Cottonwood Canyons. And it starts with saying no to a gondola in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
The math on crowding doesn't work anymore.
Economists call this the tragedy of the commons: when a shared resource has no real limit on its use, it gets exploited until it's degraded for everyone. Today, canyon traffic is capped only by the width of a two-lane road. A gondola would remove that last natural limit — and our fragile alpine terrain would pay the price.
The fight for our canyons.
Four minutes on why the Cottonwood Canyons are worth reclaiming.
One sport shouldn't own a wilderness.
Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons should be open to every kind of recreation. Skiing is only one of them — yet today the canyons are dominated by that single activity.
Should our public land serve one sport, controlled by a handful of corporations that profit from it while limiting access for everyone else?
Some ski runs sit on private property. Most sit on ours. Removing the lifts from public land would restore balance to the canyons we all share.
Ski resorts face an inherent conflict of interest: protecting wild places rarely wins out over maximizing skier volume and profit.
Today, the canyon road itself naturally limits how many people can visit at once. A gondola would remove that limiter entirely, pushing visitor numbers to a level our fragile alpine environment was never built to sustain.
Little Cottonwood Canyon in the fall.
Add your name — it takes about 30 seconds.
Built for every kind of adventure.
A determined few want a monopoly on how the Cottonwood Canyons get used. In reality, these mountains support far more than skiing — and it's that diversity of light-footprint recreation that keeps the terrain and wildlife healthy. The fastest way to erode a landscape is to concentrate ever more traffic into a single narrow use.
Rock Climbing
Hiking
Mountain Biking
Birding
Cycling
Running
Hammocking
Camping
Snowshoeing
Sledding
Backcountry Skiing
Scenic Driving
Backpacking
Picnicking
Wild Flowers
Every photo above was taken in the Cottonwood Canyons.
The Forest Service's mission is to sustain the health of our forests for future generations.
Revoke the lease.
It's time for the Forest Service to return this land to the people it belongs to. We've seen how the resorts operating under lease have treated our canyons.
“The mission of the USDA Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.”
Clearing trees, installing lifts, and packing the canyons with as many visitors as possible works against that mission, not toward it.
Future generations will judge us by what we protect today. We don't think they'll be pleased that we turned their canyons into a money machine at the expense of the environment and every other way to enjoy it.
Keep Utah wild.
Policymakers, private corporations, and even the U.S. Forest Service haven't done enough to protect our wild places. It's up to us to hold them accountable — and to stop every wild place in Utah from ending up like this.
A depiction of what Utah's wild places could become. Image via UtahStories.com.
Cottonwood Canyons in the news.
We're not the only ones raising the alarm. Here's what journalists, county leaders, and doctors have been saying.
U.S. Forest Service lease agreements.
Read the special-use permits granting each resort the right to operate on public land.
Help us reclaim the canyons.
Two petitions, thirty seconds each. Every signature makes it harder for the Forest Service and UDOT to ignore us.