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The Snow Report
The latest snow, ski, and winter sports stories from Outside.
Park City’s a great place to ski but scores even higher in the off-hill recreation and après categories. Maybe it’s because the Sundance Film Festival happens here each January that the non-skiing winter options here are legion: Among them are a seven-lane tube park, Utah’s only alpine coaster, an ice-skating rink, the new Flying Eagle zip line, and snowcat-drawn sleigh rides that take you to a high-elevation yurt for a multi-course dinner. There are also movie theaters and restaurants fit for Hollywood royalty. For all its amenities, though, this resort does not offer staffed kids’ programs or daycare outside of the ski school.
You can actually ski straight into the historic downtown strip—which pulses with boutiques, art galleries, and nightclubs—and then get back on the mountain via the Town Lift, located on Main Street.
It’s one of 16 chairlifts that transports skiers to 114 trails whose vertical rise totals 3,100 feet. Even though Park City gets 370 annual inches of snow, the powder-day rate is just eight percent, so snowmaking here’s been improved over the past year, making the 3,300-acre terrain (including three terrain parks) more inviting.
This resort is comparatively affordable—ski lessons can be gotten for as little as $40—especially for what it offers. Among the notable hotels are the luxurious Washington School House, the AAA 4-Diamond Hotel Park City, and the tony hotels surrounding Canyons Resort.
The Wasatch scenery here is quite lovely, and Park City aims to keep it that way via a bevy of eco-efforts—there’s a significant recycling program and a new kiosk exhibit that features a working wind turbine and solar panels. Over the past seven years, the resort has shrunk its carbon footprint by 20,000 tons, in part by buying wind-power offsets for 100 percent of its electricity.
CONTACT: (800) 222-7275, parkcitymountain.com
SEASON: Mid-November to mid-April
TICKETS: General: $75, ages 65 and older: $50, ages 6 and younger: free
