Photo: Powder Mountain.

EDEN, Utah — Private skiing is on the rise. A growing number of skiers are choosing to pay for more room on the mountain, and a small set of resorts are building around that preference. Of the roughly 500 ski mountains in the United States, about 45 now offer some form of private terrain or clubhouse alongside their public slopes. Among them, Powder Haven at Powder Mountain, Wasatch Peaks Ranch, and Yellowstone Club in Montana have become some of the most closely watched for its sizable private terrain offerings and exclusive access.

What sets Powder Haven apart, according to Jill Johnson, director of sales at Powder Haven, is that it was not built as a stand-alone private resort. It sits alongside a public mountain that its developers have continued to invest in, giving members access to a working town and its cultural life rather than a fully closed community.

No lines, few neighbors

The primary appeal for Powder Haven members is space, Johnson said. Powder Mountain spans 8,000 skiable acres in total, with more than 3,000 of those acres reserved for Powder Haven residents. Since Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings bought the mountain in 2023, that private terrain has continued to expand. A new lift called Primetime opened for the 2025-26 season, adding roughly 1,200 acres of north-facing terrain in a newly expanded area known as Davenport. Membership at Powder Haven is capped at 650 units, a mix of homesites, condos, townhomes, and chalets. About 220 members currently belong.

That ratio, thousands of acres against a few hundred families, is the point, Johnson said.

“It’s really been designed so that even in its busiest moments, people never feel like they’re waiting in line,” Johnson said.

The comparison Johnson draws most often is to the megapasses and crowding that have come to define big public resorts in recent years. Powder Haven’s model offers the inverse: guaranteed uncrowded runs and, for members, a level of familiarity with the mountain and each other that Johnson said gets harder to find as public resorts scale up.

A public side with its own draw

Unlike Yellowstone Club and Wasatch Peaks Ranch, which were built from the ground up as private ski areas, Powder Haven occupies a slice of a mountain that remains mostly public. Residents have full access to Powder Mountain’s roughly 5,000 acres of public terrain, in addition to their private acreage which describes the arrangement as a hybrid public-private model designed to preserve the character of Powder Mountain, an independent ski area founded in 1972. Johnson said keeping the public side thriving, rather than walling it off, is central to how Hastings has approached the project.

“We’re taking a public mountain and then taking a little slice of it and creating private skiing,” Johnson said.

That public side includes its own cultural draw: new art trails, accessible by foot, hike or ski, featuring installations from artists around the world. The art trails are run by Powder Art Foundation and sit on the public side of the mountain. Even so, Johnson pointed to it as an example of the kind of energy and legacy that a still-growing public mountain can bring to the overall Powder Mountain experience, something purely private clubs do not have.

“[Hastings] is really thinking about the Eden community, and it shows,” said Johnson, who traced his approach in part to his background building corporate culture at Netflix. “He was big on creating a culture that thrives.”

That community-minded approach extended to who Hastings picked to run the mountain. Powder Mountain’s president and CEO, Brandi Hammond, is local to the Eden-Huntsville area, a hire Johnson said reflects an intent to keep the town’s character front of mind as the resort grows.

“She’s very determined to keep the public side thriving,” Johnson said. “I love that she has an eye on the growth that needs to happen, but also, on keeping this a part of the community.”

That extra acreage also broadens what members can do on the mountain beyond downhill runs. The terrain supports snowshoeing, snowmobiling and less common winter pursuits like kite-skiing and kite-boarding, while warming huts along the Nordic trails allow for long days of cross-country skiing. In the summer, the mountain shifts to a growing network of hiking and mountain biking trails.

Continued investment on both sides of the mountain, public and private, is what Johnson said differentiates Powder Haven from its private-only peers. Updated chairlifts and lodges are underway on the public side, alongside major private-side infrastructure like the Arclodge, a 73,000-square-foot clubhouse slated to open in 2028. For members, that combination- expansive private terrain paired with a public mountain still investing in its own culture- is the pitch: room to breathe on the slopes, and a town around them that has not been sealed off.