On a Friday morning in early June, a Salt Lake Tribune photographer stood near the road at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon and took a picture of an empty lot. Nothing was under construction. No equipment sat on it. It was just eight acres of scrub and asphalt frontage, the kind of parcel most drivers pass without a second look on their way up to Snowbird or Alta.
The Utah Department of Transportation had just closed on it.
Ask most people in Cottonwood Heights about the gondola and you will get some version of the same answer: it is tied up in court, so nothing is happening. That belief is not wrong. It is just incomplete. The lawsuit really is stuck. The land next to it is not.
Two Different Clocks
The legal fight over the Little Cottonwood Canyon gondola has been running since 2023, when three separate lawsuits from Save Our Canyons, the Friends of Alta and Canyon Guard coalition, and a joint filing by Salt Lake City, Sandy City and the Metropolitan Water District of Salt Lake City and Sandy were folded into one consolidated case. As of spring 2026, the most recent public update on the case placed it in what Save Our Canyons describes as the Administrative Record review phase, the stage where a federal court works through the documents and evidence behind the agency's original decision before anyone argues the merits. It is slow by design, and nobody following the case has pointed to a ruling landing anytime soon.
Meanwhile, in May 2026, the Utah Transportation Commission voted unanimously to release roughly $8 million from its corridor preservation fund so UDOT could buy that parcel at the canyon's mouth, and the sale closed the following month. The land had been owned by Wayne Niederhauser, a former Utah state senator, and Chris McCandless, a former Sandy City councilman, through their development firm CW Management. Both men have publicly backed the gondola project for years. A pending lawsuit did not stop the sale. It could not, because the litigation challenges UDOT's environmental review and record of decision, not the agency's ability to purchase real estate along a state highway corridor it has studied for transportation improvements since 2018.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. The legal fight is about whether the gondola should exist at all. The land purchase is about making sure that if it does get built, UDOT already owns the ground it needs. Those are two different questions moving at two different speeds, and residents who assume the frozen lawsuit means a frozen project are watching the wrong clock.
What Twenty-Two Towers Would Actually Change
If the gondola is eventually built as designed, it would run eight miles from the canyon mouth to Alta, supported by 22 towers averaging around 184 feet with the tallest reaching 262 feet, roughly the height of a 26-story building. Canyon Guard built a virtual flyover called "Under a Steel Sky" to show what that looks like against the actual ridgeline, and the group's executive director, Charlie Luke, has been blunt about who feels it most directly.
"People who live by it will essentially have a 40-person bus flying over their house."
Luke was talking specifically about Cottonwood Heights, Granite and Sandy, the three communities the towers would run past on their way up the canyon. The cost has moved along with the towers. UDOT's original 2022 estimate for the gondola alternative was $550 million. By the time the lawsuits were filed the following year, that number had climbed to $728 million. As of 2026, opposition groups put the total project cost as high as $1.4 billion, with individual ticket prices projected somewhere between $90 and $200 per rider. Opponents have also argued that even a working gondola would not keep every car off Wasatch Boulevard and the surrounding streets, since it only serves Snowbird and Alta and does nothing for hikers, climbers or anyone headed elsewhere in the canyon.
Here is the part that tends to get lost in the back and forth: even under UDOT's own phased plan, gondola construction does not start until Phase 3, and a Wasatch Front Regional Council planning schedule has previously placed that somewhere between 2043 and 2050. Whatever happens in the courtroom this year, nobody is riding a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon anytime soon. The land purchase is not about this ski season. It is a long-range chess move, made now, so the pieces are already in place decades from now regardless of how the litigation shakes out.
Meanwhile, Closer to Home
While that slower story plays out at the canyon mouth, Cottonwood Heights has its own construction season underway, and it is the more immediate reason for the orange cones you have probably already noticed. The city's active projects page lists several efforts running through this fall, including:
- Ft Union Boulevard, where crews are continuing a mill and overlay from Griffith's Place through 3000 East, following last year's work between Wasatch and Griffith's Place, with curb, gutter and drainage improvements near Nutree Drive and Memory Pole
- The Cardiff Area Reconstruction Project, pouring new concrete waterways along Cardiff Circle, Twin Lakes Circle and Cardiff Road, with a tentative completion target that the city had set for September 7 of this year
- Citywide drainage repairs on Staker Way, Deville Drive and near 2700 East and 7115 South, though city updates note the Staker Way work has been delayed by an unexpected conflict with existing water lines that required coordination with Salt Lake Public Utilities before storm drain work could continue
None of this is connected to the gondola fight. It is routine infrastructure maintenance, the kind every growing suburb deals with. But it is worth separating from the canyon story precisely because the two get conflated in casual conversation. If your street has been torn up this summer, that is the city's five-year road plan at work, not UDOT positioning for a project that will not break ground for another two decades.
The Actual Takeaway
The instinct to treat "the lawsuit is stalled" as synonymous with "nothing is moving" is understandable, and it is wrong in a specific, useful way. Litigation and land assembly are not the same process, and a court taking its time on record review does not slow down a state agency with cash and a willing seller. If you want an honest read on where this project actually stands, watch the land transactions, not just the docket. UDOT has already shown it will keep buying ground at the mouth of the canyon while the case works through the courts, and there is no legal reason that pattern would stop before the litigation resolves.
That is the piece of this story that does not show up in the usual gondola coverage, which tends to frame the fight as a single binary: built or not built, win or lose. The reality on the ground in Cottonwood Heights right now is quieter and more incremental than that, a slow accumulation of parcels and options that will matter regardless of which way the lawsuit eventually breaks.
If you own property near Wasatch Boulevard, lease space along the corridor, or advise clients who do, this is exactly the kind of public process worth tracking closely, because land use decisions made years before construction often shape adjacent property values long before a shovel goes into the ground. Dan Rip Commercial Real Estate has spent three decades working the space where private ownership meets public infrastructure planning in Salt Lake County, and that vantage point is useful for anyone trying to read what a project like this actually means for the ground around it. Schedule a free consultation if you want to talk through what a corridor like this could mean for a property you own or manage.
