Deer Valley is launch location of choice for US bike industry

PressCamp is over for another year but Deer Valley Resort in Utah isn’t finished with bikes. Next up is the Cannondale and GT national sales and international distributor meetings. Prior to that was a GT media launch. Next month sees the staging of DealerCamp. Other bike industry events are also being staged here, including Scott Week, a Giant dealer meeting and the national sales meeting for Raleigh.

Why Deer Valley? Superb riding, a wide range of accommodation and, critically, close proximity to the international airport at Salt Lake City. How close? It’s possible to ride there, off road, on mountain bikes. Yesterday, Enve Wheels and Turner Bicycles led a media ride from the top of Deer Valley resort down the Big Cottonwood Canyon via Rattlesnake Gulch, and within three hours the riders were at Mill Creek sales mall on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. 

Deer Valley is a ski and bike resort in the Wasatch Range. Down the hill from the plush resort is Park City, a former mining town with a Main Street lined with Victorian wooden houses that would have once been miners’ cabins but which now retail for upwards of a millon dollars apiece.

The Sundance Film Festival is staged in Park City each February. It’s an upscale town, with dining to match. Close to town is the Mid-Mountain Trail, a 20-mile MTB trail that starts in Deer Valley, stays at about 8000 feet and is twisty, turny, swoopy and all the other sweet singletrack adjectives you can think of.

Park City has 400 miles of mountain bike trails. That’s worth repeating: 400 miles. Even for a ski town which wants to suck up to mountain bikers, that’s a freakin’ lot. And the length and quality of the trails is the reason Park City is the one and only gold-level ‘ride center’ in IMBA’s rankings.

And this easy access to world-class trails is one of the reasons Lifeboat Events originally chose Deer Valley to host PressCamp, the fourth Deer Valley staging of the five year old event.

Other bike companies started to stage trade events in Deer Valley either side of PressCamp, and then realised the many benefits of the resort. Some members of the bike industry can spend two or more weeks in Deer Valley as event after event takes place.

Prior to PressCamp, companies such as Specialized had staged dealer events in the resort but it was PressCamp and then DealerCamp which truly put Deer Valley on the bike industry’s radar. Want to hang out with bicycle executives and bike company national sales managers? Book a hotel room in Deer Valley any time in June or July.

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Pix by Billy Michels