Winter Park Mountain Base Area

A vision for a mixed-use, vibrant, and active community that thrives year-round at the Winter Park Base Area.

The Alterra Mountain Company, working within the Town of Winter Park principles, wants to strategically grow Winter Park Resort into a year-round world-class destination for all demographics and age groups. Wenk Associates served as the landscape architect as part of a larger multi-disciplinary team, led by SAR+ Architects, to prepare a Preliminary Development Plan (PDP) that describes a vision for the future Base Area that is vibrant, active, and most importantly, sustainable. Currently, Wenk is working with Alterra and the team to provide landscape architecture services for schematic design through construction documents of the Winter Park Public Realm phase of the project which includes parks and the Village Plaza.
The PDP provides a framework that will enhance community character for the Base Area while providing flexibility for innovative design and responses to future needs. While the Mountain will continue to foster active winter and summer activities like skiing and mountain biking, improved access to the Fraser River and Arapahoe National Forest, new areas of the Mountain, and new development in and around the Base Area will provide visitors with a complete user experience, as recreation will be complemented by intentional programming for cultural events, leisure activities, food-and-beverage experiences, and more. Finally, the PDP recommendations exemplify sustainability, laying the groundwork for carbon and energy-use reductions, and environmental stewardship.

Open space recommendations celebrate the unique positioning of Winter Park Resort by enhancing the existing site conditions, providing additional public gathering spaces for the
few and for the many, improving pedestrian, vehicular, and multi-modal circulation, and seeking to
provide additional outdoor recreational opportunities for year-round activity. Preservation of the natural open space is critical to protect the authentic mountain character. The open space
surrounding the developments should act as a zipper to stitch the introduced landscape back into the fabric of the surrounding natural open space.

Another goal of the PDP is to improve overall connectivity to, from, and around the mountain, making it user-friendly and experience driven. A planned mixture of pedestrian pathways, protected and shared bicycle lanes, and an extensive mixed-mobility trail network will create a safe, interconnected pedestrian and bicycle-centric environment throughout the Base Area. Important access points and extensions to the Fraser River Trail network will help improve multi-modal connections between the resort and the Town.

Wenk Associates is currently working with Alterra and the team to provide landscape architecture services for schematic design through construction documents of the Winter Park Public Realm phase of the project which includes parks and the Village Plaza.

Project Team:
SAR+ Architects, Project Lead & Architecture
Wenk Associates, Landscape Architecture
JVA Consulting Engineers, Civil Engineering
Fehr & Peers, Mobility
Otten Johnson Robinson Neff + Ragonetti PC, Legal
Flatirons, Inc., Land Survey
Kumar & Associates, Inc., Geotechnical Engineering