Lee Canyon Is Getting a Real Chairlift. Las Vegas’s Ski Area Is Growing Up.
Lee Canyon has been on a run. Since Mountain Capital Partners bought the resort from Powdr in 2023, they’ve added the Hillside base lodge, the Ponderosa terrain expansion with its own chairlift, extensive snowmaking upgrades, a lift-served mountain bike park, and a string of smaller surface lifts.
This week they announced the next piece: Chair 8, a new fixed-grip quad serving the West Bowl, set to open for the 2026-27 season.
The specs are meaningful. Chair 8 is a SkyTrac quad, 2,200 feet long with 650 vertical feet of rise, moving approximately 1,800 skiers per hour. For its first season it will serve five new runs — mostly intermediate terrain with some easier and harder options mixed in.
The West Bowl pod sits looker’s right of Lee Canyon’s current trail network and has been in the resort’s U.S. Forest Service-approved masterplan since 2020. This will be the fourth new chairlift MCP has installed at the property since taking over, and it will increase the resort’s hourly uphill capacity by roughly 20%.
MCP put the investment at $5 million for the West Bowl expansion, part of a broader $37 million announced across its portfolio. Lee Canyon is now at $23 million in capital improvements since 2019 — significant money for a ski area of its size, and a signal that the company sees real growth potential in the Southern Nevada market.
Winter visitation at Lee Canyon has increased 60% over the past decade, and the resort has been steadily transforming from a local hill into something that can hold a destination visitor’s attention for more than a single day.
For Southern California skiers, this matters for practical reasons. Lee Canyon is a sub-three-hour drive from most of Los Angeles — closer than Mammoth, cheaper than Utah, and increasingly offering enough terrain variety to justify the trip on its own merits rather than as a desperation move when everywhere else is booked.
Lift tickets on a limited daily release go as low as $14, with adult rentals starting at $19 when booked online. The West Bowl won’t make Lee Canyon Mammoth, but five new runs on a new quad is a genuine addition to a mountain that has been constrained by its lift network for years.
