2025 has been my year of high-altitude art. This summer I went to New Mexico for the relaunch of the Site Santa Fe International, then to Colorado for the Aspen Art Museum’s inaugural AIR Festival. Having been raised in Florida and based in New York for the last 15 years, my body struggled to acclimate during these short press trips. But when I was invited to visit Eden, Utah’s Powder Mountain, a “skiable outdoor art museum” with a base elevation just shy of 7,000 feet and a summit elevation of nearly 9,500 feet, the chance to explore Utah’s storied, 12,000-acre ski resort—and its headline-making, art-centric transformation—seemed too good to pass up.
A former sheep herding range, Powder Mountain became a ski resort in 1972. A bit off the beaten path (compared to Snowbird and Alta, two popular nearby resorts), Powder Mountain has always had a hidden-gem feel, despite being the largest ski resort in North America by skiable acres. Its inverted topography (meaning the base is at the top of the mountain, a setup more common in European resorts) also provides unparalleled panoramic 360-degree views to be enjoyed year round.
In 2006 and 2013, Powder Mountain changed hands, the latter to Summit Series, which hosts premium, invite-only events for world leaders and entrepreneurs. To preserve the financially struggling ski resort, Netflix cofounder and former co-CEO Reed Hastings came to its rescue in 2023. With a $100 million investment, Hastings—who had been skiing in Utah for over 20 years and bought a home at Powder Mountain in 2021—became its majority owner.
Unlike multi-mountain mega-pass companies like Ikon, under which Snowbird and Alta operate, Hastings introduced a public-private model where approximately 2,700 acres would be served by private lifts and 5,500 acres by public lifts. The former would be the ultimate perk for those who bought property at Powder Haven, the developing 650-family community atop the mountain, where luxurious amenities will include a sprawling clubhouse, opening for the 2027-28 ski season (membership fees are expected to range between $30,000 and $100,000 per year). Property sales will also benefit the infrastructure, overhead, and expansion of the public resort, whose quirky, historic charms (such as the beloved Powder Keg pub, more or less unchanged since 1972) will be preserved.
“One of my goals in stewarding Powder Mountain into the future is to build a place of lasting beauty,” Hastings, who splits his time between Santa Cruz, California, and Powder Mountain, tells Vogue. In thinking about how to further distinguish Powder Mountain from other resorts, as well as how to leave a meaningful legacy, Hastings sought to make the resort a mecca for skiing and art. “Nature is stunning on its own, but after visiting destinations like Storm King and Naoshima, [my wife and I] were inspired to integrate large-scale art into the mountain landscape with the intent to enhance the experience of being in wild terrain, provoking moments of contemplation, pause, and discovery within it.”
To bring his vision of a skiable outdoor art museum to life, Hastings tapped architecture partners, including Reed Hilderbrand (Storm King) and Johnston Marklee (MCA Chicago), and established Powder Art Foundation (PAF), a nonprofit dedicated to celebrating historical land art, engaging contemporary artists, and making work on Powder Mountain as accessible to the public as possible (PAF solely operates on the public side of the mountain). While Powder Mountain is free to hike in the summer and the fall, in order to access 10 of the 11 current artworks, a ski lift pass is required in the winter (adult day tickets currently cost upwards of $100, while season passes cost upwards of $1,000). The goal, however, is to eventually have a concentrated area of artworks for the public to access year-round, no ski lift pass required.
PAF’s creative team includes Powder Mountain’s chief creative officer, Alex Zhang, as PAF’s president of the board of directors (his hospitality, tech, and cultural background includes roles at Summit and Soho House); PAF executive director Alexandra Magnuson, who spent a decade at Gagosian working with large-scale sculptures and installations by land art giants such as Michael Heizer; and PAF artistic director Matthew Thompson, whose vast curatorial and art advisory experience includes roles at the Aspen Art Museum and LACMA.
On October 6 and 7, ahead of the 2025-26 ski season, Powder Mountain welcomed a small group of its residents, arts professionals from near and afar, and journalists, including myself, to celebrate the completion of PAF’s inaugural suite of permanent artworks, including two historical works (conceptual artist Nancy Holt’s 1986 fire-based work Starfire—the one work that doesn’t require a ski lift pass—and the permanent fabrication of a towering 1971 stacked-stone artwork by late Japanese sculptor Nobuo Sekine) and two site-specific commissions by New York–based artist Kayode Ojo (a faux-crystal chandelier installation among the trees) and LA-based artist EJ Hill (a trio of colorful, functioning ski-lift installations).
Magnuson tells Vogue that PAF’s programming should be “discerning and approachable”: “We want to connect with everyone who visits the mountain—those who come to hike or ski and encounter the art by chance, those who are curious and seek us out, and those who visit us as an art destination.” Special attention is being paid to grounding the project in the region and honoring the state’s important land-art heritage. Magnuson continues, “California is thought of as a place to make large-scale sculpture. Its history of artmaking is wrapped up in its oft-cited assets: amazing light, high-ceilinged studios, and a wealth of local art schools, foundries, and fabricators. In Utah, the legacy of making art—from petroglyphs to Spiral Jetty—is integrated into and in dialogue with the landscape itself.”
The October festivities also celebrated Powder’s new long-term partnership with Dia Art Foundation, which Magnuson says “wrote the book on the cultivation and stewardship of artworks in non-traditional settings.” For more than 25 years, Dia has served as a stewarding presence in Utah with its ongoing care of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76). Magnuson says the partnership will entail “collection sharing (which has wonderful potential for loaned artworks on the mountain as we build more infrastructure), institutional development,” as well as a coordinated visitation program for Dia’s two iconic remote land art sites.
It’s no easy feat to install artworks at Powder. Not only can the ground level shift 10-plus feet depending on the time of year, but works also have to be engineered for 100-mile-per-hour winds, not to mention the obvious numerous layers of state approval to ensure skier safety. Nevertheless, Magnuson shares that there will be several major new artworks per year through 2028, “perhaps adding one or two artworks to the collection each year” after that. One of the most buzzed-about highlights is a pavilion breaking ground in 2026 that will house James Turrell’s Ganzfeld Apani (2011)—originally commissioned for and displayed at the 54th Venice Biennale— and a significant 1970s Bruce Nauman installation. Other artists behind future works at Powder Mountain include Jenny Holzer, Arthur Jafa, Paul McCarthy, Nikita Gale, Gala Porras-Kim, and Raven Halfmoon (Andrea Zittel could also be seen siting her work during my visit).
On a 45-minute morning hike named the “Paper Airplane Trail” to visit Griffin Loop’s Launch Intention (2014), a 50-foot metal paper airplane that precedes Hastings’ ownership, I was struck by the sheer scale of Powder Mountain. Surrounded by endless expanses of golden aspen trees and the occasional deer hopping through the wild terrain, it’s clear nature will always reign supreme here. It would be impossible to reach every artwork by foot—but the buildup of anticipation, followed by the awe-inspiring payoff at the end of the trail, is precisely the point. “We spend a lot of time siting the works, as the distance between them on foot is very different than on skis. If you see too many things in quick succession, they’re going to lose their power,” says Thompson, adding that the idea of a highly controlled, specific entry sequence to experience a work reflects similar journeys to visit land art in remote places. The altitude, which made even this small hike feel strenuous, is also at play. “When you exert yourself physically, neurochemically, there are different things that start to happen that are really interesting from an art viewer standpoint,” says the curator. “Your sense of time slows down, your focus narrows, and you really feel yourself as an embodied being.”
At Powder, all senses are engaged. Two monumental bells by American sculptor Davina Semo are tucked away behind trees; skiers have already learned that ringing the bell could be a rite of passage, or a chance to let others know they’re about to dive into an epic run. Elsewhere, an eerie 17th-century Lutheran hymn by the Turner Prize–winning Scottish artist can be heard but hardly seen. Titled We’ll All Go Together, the meditative work’s lyrics speculate about what happens after we die. “It was important for us to install a work like this early to show that we really want to activate the full emotional band and create something that is very salient in the landscape,” says Thompson.
The work that most resonated with me, however, was Holt’s Starfire, situated outside of Skylodge, one of the mountain’s main eateries and gathering points at its summit. Realized in close collaboration with the Holt/Smithson Foundation, the work, which is lit two hours before sunset each day, is composed of eight ground-level fire pits arranged to mirror the Big Dipper constellation and the North Star. The work looks out onto Utah’s Great Basin Desert, where in a remote valley, about three hours from Salt Lake City, the artist’s famed Sun Tunnels similarly engages with natural phenomena. There, four enormous concrete cylindrical tunnels, arranged in a cross formation, are positioned to frame the sun as it rises and sets during the summer and winter solstices. Small holes project constellations on the tunnels’ interior.
There’s something about standing by the fire on a chilly day, watching the flames dance in the wind, listening to the wood crackling, and smelling it as it burns that has an undeniably primal appeal. When standing before Starfire, the three female journalists found ourselves in the midst of an unprompted emotional heart-to-heart (blame it on the altitude). The grapefruit-colored sky and alpine vistas seemed unbeatable—that is, until we made our way to Smithson’s magnum opus the following morning.
Located about two hours from Powder Mountain, Spiral Jetty is on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake—a site that, beautiful but ecologically compromised, appealed to the artist, who was interested in extracted land uses and entropy. There’s an uncanny sense of time collapsing, as the 6,000 tons of black basalt rocks and earth from the site are imbued with a sense of prehistory, while the iconic 1,500-foot-long coil design feels like it could have been an alien intervention. After being submerged for 30 years, the stones emerged in 2002, and today the nearly one-mile, sparkling, salt-crusted walk to the foamy water line—where pink- and blue-hued water caused by microbial blooms forms Richard Diebenkorn–like fields of color—has become as integral to the pilgrimage as the earthwork itself.
“The work has become a barometer for climate change…it has become a radical demonstration of entropy in a way Smithson couldn’t possibly have predicted,” says Dia Curator Jordan Carter. Nancy Holt and the Robert Smithson Foundation gifted Dia the work in 1999, and today it stewards the site with the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), part of the University of Utah, and the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster University. Ironically, while basking in the otherworldly surroundings, I suddenly see a mushroom-like gray cloud rise in the distance. A few minutes later, roaring booms circle past us. Never having experienced anything like this, I learned it’s Open Detonation Season at a nearby Air Force base (apparently this is the safest way to dispose of outdated and unstable explosives). Brilliant yet bleak, my Spiral Jetty experience brings me back to reality. Suddenly, the entropy seems less shocking.
A taste of Salt Lake City’s art scene
With my remaining few hours of the trip spent in Salt Lake City, I visited two local institutions to get a sense of the local art scene. In speedy tours of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) and UMFA, I was impressed by their inclusivity, and simultaneous desire to empower home-grown talents and expose communities to eminent international names. Galleries devoted to ancient global art, as well as those full of work by female contemporary artists, ranging from Yayoi Kusama and Helen Frankenthaler to Betye Saar and Kay WalkingStick, shattered my pre-conceived notion that the UMFA’s holdings would be dominated by American art and potentially problematic views of the West. If only I had more time to explore.
On the heels of my first visit to Utah, my second trip is already planning itself, from trekking to Sun Tunnels to revisiting local museums and exploring other institutions in the area, such as Ogden Contemporary Arts, which opened in 2020, and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, whose collection of American Modernism includes a 21-foot-tall woven metal sculpture by Ruth Asawa. In the coming years, the Salt Lake Art Museum (dedicated to Utah artists), as well as the Museum of Utah (Utah’s first state history museum), will also open.
Of course, Powder Mountain, too, promises something special with each subsequent visit. As someone who’s never skied, I genuinely feel more eager than ever to give it a go and have the prime Powder experience. After all, what could be more perfect for an art lover than learning how to ski via a kaleidoscopic magic carpet designed by the American artists Gerard Kelly?