Little Cottonwood Canyon, Alta and Snowbird

In the 1860s and 1870s prospectors found rich veins of silver in the upper canyon, and the boomtown of Alta sprang up near its head. For a few frenzied years it was one of the loudest camps in the territory, with saloons and mills and thousands of miners, until falling silver prices, fires, and deadly avalanches emptied it out. The scars of that era, old mine dumps and tram remnants, still show on the slopes above the modern lifts.

Lower in the canyon, its granite itself became a resource. In the 1860s stonecutters quarried blocks of Little Cottonwood granite and hauled them by ox team down to Salt Lake City, where they were laid up into the great temple on Temple Square. The polished walls of that building came out of this canyon. Long before the miners and quarrymen, the Wasatch canyons were homeland and hunting ground for the Ute, Shoshone, and Goshute peoples, whose descendants remain in Utah today.

Little Cottonwood is world famous for a simple reason: it collects extraordinary amounts of very dry, very light snow. Storms rolling in off the Great Basin dry out crossing the desert, then rise and cool against the steep Wasatch wall, wringing out snow that falls cold and feathery rather than heavy and wet. The result is the deep, weightless powder that made Alta and Snowbird legendary.

That same steepness and snow load make the canyon one of the most avalanche-prone corridors in the country. Crews use control work to bring slides down safely, and the single road up the canyon closes at times for safety, sometimes with people held in place while the slopes are managed. It is a place where the mountains still very much set the terms.

The canyon is carved from a huge body of granite that cooled deep underground and was later uplifted and exposed. Glaciers ground down through it during the ice ages, leaving the U-shaped profile, the polished slabs, and the hanging side canyons you see today. The clean, solid rock made Little Cottonwood a birthplace of Utah rock climbing, with long crack and slab routes on walls like the Coalpit and the buttresses near the mouth.

Above the cliffs lies open alpine country. Trails climb from the canyon floor to a string of high lakes and basins, Cecret Lake, Red Pine, White Pine, and others, where wildflowers bloom in July and August and the air stays cool while the valley bakes. Higher still, ridgelines connect toward the crest of the range and the neighboring basins of Big Cottonwood and American Fork.

For all its ski traffic, the canyon holds real wildlife. Moose are common in the willows and aspen, mule deer move through the forest, and mountain goats work the high granite near the crest. Pikas and marmots live in the boulder fields, and in the quiet of summer mornings the alpine basins fill with birdsong.

Winter is the canyon's headline season, deep, snowy, and busy, with skiing that runs late into spring. Late spring melts the lower canyon first, and by summer the high trails open to hikers and the wildflowers peak. Autumn sets the aspen ablaze with gold and thins the crowds before the first storms return. At this elevation, weather changes fast in every season, so it pays to check conditions before heading up.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.