Cross-country skiers and biathletes could hit the trails at Soldier Hollow six weeks earlier than usual this winter, thanks to a 50,000-cubic-foot pile of snow hiding through a Heber Valley summer.
The Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation is spending $300,000 on what Operations Manager Bill Pierce calls a homemade glacier: a mound of machine-made snow roughly the size of an ice skating rink, tucked behind a grove of trees a few hundred feet from the base lodge. The pile is covered with a waterproof outer layer, a heavy geotech fabric, and foam insulation beneath. Pierce and his crew built it over 18 days during the coldest stretch of last winter, using roughly one-third of Soldier Hollow's total water budget for the season.
The goal is to open a 2-kilometer Nordic loop between Nov. 5 and Nov. 15, 2026. That would shave weeks off a timeline that once started at Christmas and more recently has landed around Thanksgiving.
"When I first got here, we opened either at Christmas or a week and a half before," Pierce said in a July 30 interview with KPCW. "Right now, our goal is we've been opening at Thanksgiving, and the goal now is to get to somewhere between the 5th and 15th of November."
Pierce said the project is the first of its kind at a Nordic venue in North America. Snow preservation using wood chips is common in Scandinavia, but UOLF Chief Operating Officer Calum Clark said that approach was ruled out because of the labor involved and Utah's lower latitude, which brings hotter summers and more intense sunlight.
Even with late-July daytime temperatures hitting 95°F in the Wasatch Back, the temperature beneath the insulating blanket stays around 35°F. Pierce expects the pile to shrink about 20% this first summer because the ground underneath hasn't yet frozen into permafrost. Once it does, he projects annual losses closer to 15%.
The project carries extra urgency after Utah's worst snowpack season on record in 2025–26. Clark said the dismal winter forced the foundation to act.
"Having our worst season on record certainly gets you to sit up straight and think about how you can deliver a sustainable venue for all the constituents," Clark said.
Soldier Hollow hosted cross-country skiing and biathlon at the 2002 Winter Olympics and is expected to host both sports again when the Games return to Utah in 2034. During the 2002 Games, organizers had a contingency plan to truck snow from Strawberry Reservoir, roughly 2,000 feet higher in elevation. If the preservation project succeeds, emergency snow could be stored on-site years before 2034.
Clark said the guaranteed early-season snow also gives elite athletes a reliable training destination ahead of the Olympics, reducing the need to travel elsewhere for on-snow time. The UOLF confirmed the snow pile was still intact as of July 30, when Pierce and Clark posed beside it for a photo.
