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Brighton Crest 6 Lift and Snake Creek Lodge: All Sizzle and No Steak? (Vol. 25)

Welcome to the latest PeakRankings newsletter! In this series, we round up the best news and deals from the ski industry.

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The Scoop 👓

For the 2023-24 season, Utah’s Brighton ski resort completed its biggest suite of capital investments in over a decade.

First off, the resort replaced its workhorse Crest Express quad with the brand-new, state-of-the-art Crest 6 six-pack. The new lift comes with a loading carpet and uses contemporary Doppelmayr D-Line technology to allow for a faster travel speed than traditional detachable lifts.

The Crest 6 is Brighton’s first six-pack lift and its first new lift installation since 2007.

In addition, Brighton added the Snake Creek Lodge—its first mid-mountain lodge ever. This facility brought on-mountain seating without forcing guests to ski or ride all the way down to one of its bases for the first time in the resort’s history.

On the surface, both of these projects bring significant experience changes that look to make Brighton more competitive with other Utah destinations. However, both projects have come with a few caveats that limit their overall effectiveness—and do not directly map to a better overall mountain experience.

Brighton’s trail map, with the Crest 6 lift highlighted in green and the Snake Creek Lodge location highlighted in orange.

What This Means for You 🎿

Crest 6 Lift Upgrade

Brighton’s new Crest lift might be the most advanced chairlift in the Cottonwoods, with a smooth ride, contoured seats, and a 20% faster ride time than even the old high-speed quad, which was no slouch itself. In addition, the six-place seating and wider chair spacing makes for more efficient chairlift operations than the old setup, with fewer misloads.

The Crest 6 lift is 20% faster than the old quad, but its wider chair spacing means that any capacity increase is negligible.

However, the new Crest 6’s loading setup isn’t perfect. Rather than the old quad setup where guests could line up on both sides of the lift, the Crest 6 only loads from the skiers’ right side of the lift, creating more congestion on that side of the hill and making it more of a slog to load the lift if one is coming from the skiers’ left Milly zone. Guests who instinctively ski or ride down to the skiers’ left side of the lift will be forced to hike uphill to the loading area on the other side, which can be fairly annoying.

Perhaps in part due to the new loading carpet, the Crest 6 only loads from the skiers’ right side of the lift.

In addition, while the Crest 6 may see fewer misloads than the old quad, its on-paper capacity isn’t actually any higher due to wider chair spacing. On top of that, Brighton’s lifties still haven’t figured out how to efficiently manage a six-person queue, so at least as of the 2023-24 season, the resort has not consistently loaded chairs to capacity. Due to these circumstances, the upgraded chair’s impact on lift lines hasn’t been all that noticeable.

Finally, while this is really just a minor nitpick, the Crest 6’s massive LED bottom terminal screen does look a bit out of place at this otherwise local-feeling resort.

The Snake Creek Lodge is located on an inconvenient hill that requires an uphill hike from most nearby trails. When at the Snake Creek lift loading area, it’s nearly hidden from view (as seen in the above picture).

Snake Creek Mid-Mountain Lodge

Brighton’s first ever mid-mountain facility should theoretically have made it a lot easier to stop in for a break. However, the lodge has a number of design flaws that significantly limit its practicality.

First off, the Snake Creek Lodge is located on a hill several feet above the main trail junction it serves, so it’s a pain to get up there unless you really know what you’re doing. In addition, the lodge is just a lot smaller than the demand entails—even on off-peak weekdays, it can be tough to find a seat. Even more frustrating is the bathroom situation—there are only six stalls in the entire facility, and on busy days, you might be waiting longer to use them than for the actual chairlifts.

The food at Brighton’s new Snake Creek Lodge is pretty good, but limited seating and bathroom access hurt the facility’s effectiveness.

Finally, Brighton has paired its new mid-mountain lodge with the conversion of its Milly cafeteria into a full service restaurant. While there’s still an outdoor shack at the base of Milly, you can’t sit inside and warm up anymore unless you do a sit-down lunch, which can be really frustrating if you’re spending time in this isolated area on a cold day.

The food at the Snake Creek Lodge is really good—and seating capacity opens up a bit when it’s nice enough to sit outside—but overall, it doesn’t feel like Brighton’s on-mountain facility setup has improved all that much.

Brighton has paired its new mid-mountain lodge with the conversion of its Milly base cafeteria into a full-service restaurant, meaning guests can’t go inside and warm up anymore without ordering a sit-down meal.

Final Thoughts

While Brighton’s Crest 6 and Snake Creek Lodge projects may look flashy, they ultimately fall short when it comes to addressing the resort’s biggest issues: crowd management and a lousy on-mountain facility setup. Don’t get us wrong, these enhancements do have some very tangible benefits—but it feels like they’ve come paired with numerous flaws that are out of place for such substantial capital investments.

Coupled with the weekend and holiday paid parking policy that the resort launched this past winter, those hoping for a much-improved experience at Brighton this past winter may have ended up a bit disappointed.

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