The problem with OneWasatch is that a ski lift is never just a ski lift, Ms. Briefer said. Ski lifts mean new outbuildings, new access roads and felled trees. Such changes erode the water quality, and quantity, for people downstream who basically live in a desert.

While OneWasatch’s backers say their plan has no development attached to it, water officials and others argue that construction will inevitably follow the chairlifts. Ski lifts “are the camel’s nose under the tent,” Jeff Niermeyer, the director of the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities, told this reporter two years ago when speaking about SkiLink, another controversial ski-connection proposal that has been shelved. Similar concerns apply to OneWasatch, Mr. Niermeyer said this month: “It still has the potential to draw a bunch of development into these canyons,” adding, “I am not willing to trade watershed protection for ‘wow’ factor.”

Other opponents worry about elbow room. Nearly 80 percent of Utah’s population lives at the feet of the Wasatch. The Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, which includes much of this high country, is one of the five most-visited national forests in the country. Millions play in the same postage stamp of mountains above Salt Lake City, a roughly 10-square-mile patch of crimped topography that includes those seven ski resorts. Backcountry skiers long ago named their beloved, crowded playground “WasAngeles.”

Jamie Kent, a real estate broker and president of the volunteer Wasatch Backcountry Alliance, said, “We’ve got it all: world-class lift-skiing, world-class backcountry skiing, world-class heli-skiing — and it’s all happening in this very small area, above 7,000 feet.” A tentative, hard-won detente has been struck among the user groups, Mr. Kent said. Now the ski areas want a larger piece of a pie that’s already completely spoken for, he said.

Residents have repeatedly said they love their ski resorts but don’t want them to grow. In a study conducted in 2009 and 2010 as part of work on the future of the most popular mountain canyons, nearly all Utah residents interviewed said they did not want resorts to expand beyond their existing boundaries. The long-range plan for the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest calls for no such expansion.

While the new lifts would mostly be built on private land, the repercussions of these lifts would ripple far beyond that, Mr. Kent said. The biggest trend in skiing right now is “sidecountry” skiing — riding the chairlifts but then heading out beyond the groomed runs for a more adventurous experience. One proposed lift in the Grizzly Gulch area at Alta Ski Resort that would likely require some public land is particularly controversial. It would “wipe out many hundreds of acres of prime backcountry terrain, plus turn much of the central Wasatch into resort sidecountry,” a well-known local skier, Andrew McLean, wrote in an email.

Mr. Kent said his group understands that many of these lifts are being proposed for ski resorts’ private property. “But we also recognize that they operate largely on public land,” he added, explaining that these mountains are a patchwork of public and private ownership. “To quote the group Save our Canyons,” which focuses on protecting the Wasatch canyons, “ 'It’s a public-private partnership. And partnerships balance out.' ”