Few places on earth are as strange as Park City, Utah, at the end of ski season.
I arrived at this unlikely conclusion after spending a March weekend in the mining-town-turned-millionaires’-playground.
The First Family happened to be vacationing at nearby Deer Valley only days after the President’s Senate trial acquittal. Secret Service agents in suits mixed uneasily with late-season skiers waddling down Park City’s Main Street in short-sleeves, jeans and unbuckled ski boots.
Meanwhile, more reports in the Salt Lake City Olympic bribery debacle were coming to light. Resort officials weren’t in a talking mood. The ones I managed to corner shrugged the whole thing off, as if it didn’t make a difference, but they were visibly uncomfortable at speculation that the winter games could be stripped from them.
Did the surrealism affect the skiing? Hardly. If anything, it made the experience more interesting. Other ski resorts throw slopeside beer parties at the end of the season; Park City hosts converging scandals for a finale.
Late winter or early spring is a choice time to visit Park City, which, if all goes as planned, will be the site of the giant slalom and snowboarding events during the tainted ‘02 Olympics. The crush of tourists starts to ease as the off-season approaches. The days are longer, the temperatures warmer.
Even though locals concede that Park City doesn’t get the best snow in Utah — you have to cross the next mountain range to Solitude, Brighton or Alta for truly unsurpassed powder — conditions on a so-so day are often better than a good day of Vermont skiing.
In fact, only the pickiest of powderhounds turn their noses up at Park City.
Its ski area looks deceptively small from the base. But once I took one of its high-speed quads to the mountaintop, I was awed by the vastness of its 3,000 skiable acres, most of it intermediate and advanced runs. Its $53-a-day lift ticket literally lets you take a different run every time and still not cover the whole mountain in a day. What Park City may lack in snow, it more than makes up for in slopes.
And Utah’s largest ski resort just keeps getting bigger. This year alone it added 800 new acres of terrain and a very fast six-passenger chairlift, affectionately known as the “Six Pack.” Park City’s size is a hot topic both in town and at the other ski resorts. There’s talk that someday Utah’s major ski areas could be linked by ski lift, not unlike Austria’s Arlberg resorts.
Look over the mountain for a reason to keep things as they are. If Park City is for millionaires, then Deer Valley is for billionaires. Hotel rooms start at $450 a night during high season; homes routinely sell for $3 million. The number of lift tickets is limited and snowboarding is banned.
Deer Valley is a sedate hideaway of groomed, gentle slopes. Its restaurants are reservations-only, and don’t even bother setting foot in one unless you’re ready to max out your credit card. People don’t come here to ski as much as they do to be seen. I can’t imagine sending Park City’s riffraff over the hill to this Aspen wannabe.
Just the thought of a snowboarder sharing a slope with a gazillionaire would be odder than seeing Bill Clinton on skis (for the record, he wasn’t seen on the slopes.)
Not that Park City is cheap. It isn’t. It’s just less expensive than Deer Valley. To determine this, I used my decidedly unscientific Burger Measure. You can buy a burger for less than $10 in Park City (at Burgies on Main Street. I highly recommend it, Mr. President). No such luck at Deer Valley, where I blew $15 on a similar meal.
But I won’t remember my visit to Park City for its fast food as much as I will for its locals. At every store, museum and lift line, someone had a presidential sighting to talk about — and absolutely nothing to say about the Olympic games, despite the large banners prominently advertising the event.
Their silence on the matter suggested that even though Park City has its problems, they need to be put into perspective. And, come what may, that the snow is pretty decent too.
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