PARK CITY, Utah — Usually, I don’t like heights. The thought of a zip line turns my legs to mush. I’m more of a city girl. Take me to Paris, and I will be all smiles. Send me to a rural setting? Not so much.
But to my astonishment, I was having a fabulous time high atop a mountain (where you can’t avoid looking all the way down) in Park City. And no, I didn’t catch a glimpse of Robert Redford, who lives, at least part of the time, nearby, where his Sundance Resort hosts the celebrated, as well as lots of just plain folks.
Redford is also, of course, the guiding light behind the Sundance Film Festival, held primarily in Park City, which now draws some 50,000 attendees every year. It will next be held starting Jan. 17 and run for 10 days.
“They come in these little stiletto heels and tiny cocktail dresses, and they don’t realize how much snow there is in Utah in January,” a local resident confided with a chuckle. The festival has grown so large that it now holds screenings as far away as Salt Lake City, and as close as the Park City High School auditorium.
Places to stay come at a high premium during the Sundance Festival.
I happily found that that was not the case in late August-early September, when the weather was sheer perfection and the rates drop. Until the latter part of November, when the ski season starts, there will still be plenty of bargains.
My husband, Jim, and I stayed at the Hyatt Escala Lodge in the
Canyons Resort community, in a condo far larger than our New York apartment, without feeling much pain in the pocketbook. And while I was out and about, busy not doing the zip line, someone came in and straightened everything up, organized my closet, set my shoes straight, and even fixed the high-tech coffee machine, which I felt was an IQ test in disguise.
TREETOP VIEW
Before I knew it, I was on a chairlift, whooshing up the side of a mountain in the Deer Valley community, and loving it. I was so busy ogling the green and gorgeous scenery that my fear of heights evaporated. My husband happily smiled down at the treetops, experiencing the world from a completely different angle. It was late August and trees were already beginning to turn. Four days later, whole mountainsides were sporting only orange, red and yellow leaves. It simply happens overnight.
In minutes, I was bravely leaping like a gazelle off the chairlift, and we were seated at 8,100 feet above sea level in the Royal Street Cafe ordering innovative Southwestern cuisine and admiring the view. There I learned that readers of Ski magazine ranked Deer Valley the No. 1 ski resort in the United States for five years in a row, citing 300 inches of good powder and its carefully limited number of lift tickets, which keeps lines short. Its 2010-11 winter season recorded the best year ever for snowfall in the mountains. Nonetheless, it can make snow on 70 of its 100 ski trails, should the need arise.
On this late summer day, the trails were filled with folks on thick-tired mountain bikes, coasting - sometimes perilously fast, or so it looked - down the trails, or pumping up steep paths, emulating the little engine that could.
There was a time when Park City almost never saw glamorous folks from New York or Hollywood, or even folks with the time or inclination to hike the mountains for fun. It began its life as a silver-mining town, where living was more than easy for the mine owners and bone-crunchingly challenging for the miners. The Park City Museum, recently renovated to the tune of $9 million, does a world-class job of telling that story.
GLEAM OF SILVER
Part of that saga - as revealed in the museum - revolves around the hard fact that it took 2,000 pounds of ore to get 1 pound of silver, and it took human skill to liberate that pound of silver from the rock. Immigrants from as far away as China, Eastern Europe and Ireland arrived via the new transcontinental railroad to tackle the task.
According to the folks at the museum, all of Park City sits above a maze of more than 1,000 miles of tunnels, remnants of those dark days underground. One favorite exhibit: the massive dress worn by the “Silver Queen,” a smart woman who made millions upon millions from the miners’ labor. They were in the tunnels while she was at her couturier.
The museum is on Park City’s pretty Main Street, perfectly situated for exploring galleries filled with world class artwork, browsing in a bookshop, picking up some fudge to tide you over, and poking through racks of interesting clothes. It was a good thing that I did that before I went to the whiskey tasting at High West Distillery & Saloon, also known for its special house lemonade.
Since we were staying in the Canyonlands community, we decided to take a guided hike there. We took the Red Pine gondola up, way up, where our guide, Mike, led us along a ridgeline that topped out at 11,300 feet. Even though we were in a sea of green, turning orange and red almost by the minute, Mike talked snow as in, “The Wasatch is said to have the best snow on earth.” PEOPLE WATCHING
I soon discovered that my favorite sport in Park City was watching people who initially looked a bit terrified zoom down the mountain via zip line. I, being no fool, did not zoom, but those who did stepped away from the line with an enviable look of triumph.
The aspens, on that late summer day, were already turning yellow. An alpine lake, its water sometimes used for snow making, glimmered in the late summer sun. And later, on the outdoor Ski Beach, the innovative Southwestern food at the Redtail Grill capped off the afternoon. Life was well-nigh perfect.
When Utah hosted the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, Park City and its environs handled alpine skiing and ski jumping, snowboarding and bobsled and luge events. That major event in the life of this small town is memorialized in a sophisticated Olympics and Ski Museum, just outside of town proper. The compound also includes rides down the actual bobsled run (it’s a good place to see white-faced, blue knuckled kids having the time of their lives). Olympic Park remains an official training center for bobsled, luge and freestyle aerials, where skiers can practice difficult jumps - we’re talking somersaults in the air - into a pool in summer.
Back downtown, we visited the lovely Kimball Art Center, with regularly changing exhibits of contemporary work. Through Jan. 3, it is hosting a major collection of Dale Chihuly’s designs in glass - the private collection of George R. Stroemple, a major collector of 21st-century art glass.
For such a small town, Park City offers an extraordinary variety of culture, shopping, dining and certainly outdoor activities. But what I found most winning of all, it offers a lovely way of life and sense of community.
For more information on Park City, call (800) 453-1360 or check out visitparkcity.com.
Travel, Pages 56 on 10/28/2012