Archives West Finding Aid

Brighton, Utah first gained notoriety on 24 July 1857 when Mormon pioneers convened there to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. Nearly eighty years later, in 1936, the Wasatch Mountain Club built a rope tow in Brighton, thus creating the first serviced ski area in the state of Utah. Improvements continued in 1946 when Brighton Recreations built, on the slopes of Mt. Millicent, the first chairlift in Brighton. Responding to Brighton Recreation's developments, a competing lift company in Brighton managed by Zane Doyle and Willard Jensen built, in 1956, a double chair lift, the first in the intermountain region. Seven years later Doyle and Jensen bought out their competitor and created Mt. Majestic, Inc., which added two new chairlifts and night skiing facilities at Brighton. In 1986, Boyne USA, a family-owned corporation headed by John Kircher, purchased the ski area and proceeded to build two additional lifts which today allow a skier at Brighton to access 850 acres of terrain. Additional items of interest in this collection include a history of Brighton's Young Women's Mutual Improvement Association Girls Camp, a history of Butlerville, Utah, a history of the Alpine Rose Lodge, and a report on the construction of both the Twin Lakes and Phoebe-Mary dams in 1915.