Park City Condo
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Park City Resort is a mere 30 miles away, but worlds away from Salt Lake City.
And Park City condo prices are 3x’s higher than Salt Lake City.
From its wild honky-tonk beginning, you’ve been able to do things in Park City that you couldn’t there.
Party and ski on the World’s Best Snow!
Park City goes back to the Civil War, when the federal government, fearing that Brigham Young might take too much interest in the notion of secession, stationed troops in the Wasatch Mountains and encouraged them to snoop around for any precious metal that would lure others out there who weren’t Latter-day Saints or any other kind.
The soldiers succeeded, finding silver that led to Irish, Scottish, Swedish, Finnish, Chinese and Slavic adventurers, among others.
The Hearst fortune started here, as did any number of practices that weren’t countenanced in the rest of Utah.
At one point, Sin City, as it was sometimes called, offered up 27 saloons and at least one bordello.
Its most famous madam, a 200-pound peg-legged woman known as Mother Urban, was so well regarded that her name is still attached to a local establishment.
The silver petered out before too long, but about a century after it was discovered, Park City hit the mother lode.
There was gold in the snow, which brought an avalanche in Park City condo prices.
In the 1960s it finally occurred to Can’t Park City, as it ought to be called, to reinvent itself as Utah’s only full-fledged ski town.
It has done this to spectacular effect, the first-rate resorts in the immediate vicinity now numbering three.
The first was Park City Mountain Resort, which looms northwest of Main Street. It carries the town’s name in a proud fashion - it is consistently ranked among the top 10 ski resorts in the country - and this month its vast hollows handsomely serve the Olympic snowboarding and giant slalom events.
Commanding the southern view is Deer Valley, recently rated by Ski Magazine as America’s No. 1 ski resort.
Catering to a crowd that’s willing to subsidize luxury - the most conspicuous example being the famous Stein Eriksen Lodge, named for the great Norwegian skier of the 1950s - Deer Valley prohibits snowboarding, but for Olympic purposes is cutting loose with slalom and freestyle aerials.
Left out of the 2002 Olympic competition is the area’s newest and biggest resort, the Canyons.
The Canyons now has several new condominium and town home developments under construction which include: Silverado, Escala, Sunrise at Escala, Dakota Mountain Lodge, Juniper Landing, Fairway Springs and Vintage on the Strand.
Located north of town, the sprawling, eight-peak, 16-lift, 3,500-skiable-acre complex is making good where others twice failed.
In its first incarnation as Park West - when Robert Redford and Paul Newman were introduced by locals to Sneaky Pete’s beer and loganberry wine - the place once resorted to bringing in a nearby Native American to bless the mountain with water that was supposed to attract snow.
When it didn’t work and the resort turned down an offer for the Ute to do it again, he declared that the slopes must have been built on an old Indian burial ground.
More recently, they’ve been a gathering spot for snowboarders.
In the late 1980s, the resort was the first in Park City to offer snowboarding, but the Canyons never sought to be an Olympic site; the change of hands occurred too late.
While the Canyons has set the pace hereabouts for snowboarding, ski jumping is the province of the area’s Utah Winter Sports Park, known this February as Utah Olympic Park, the site of ski jumping, bobsled, skeleton, luge and nordic combined.
Then there is the Park City Town Lift, which carries skiers back and forth to the center of the hilly village.
The city slope leads to a bridge that overpasses Park Street and comes out in the thick of the odd shops, unexpected restaurants and un-Utah watering holes.
Occasionally, a local sportsman will eschew the overpass, slide straight to the street and blend in.
Much of the blending occurs over the hand-warming fires situated up and down Main Street, where traffic is temporarily prohibited.
Having the World’s Greatest Snow has been amply stoked here and shared by the world’s skiing fans.
After a wild day on the slopes head over such local institutions as The Phat Tire Saloon, Badass Coffee and Zoom, which is Redford’s roadhouse.
Redford also brought to Park City the Sundance Film Festival, typically a leading winter attraction.
In that respect, it is once again the anti-Salt Lake.
Unlike its more intimate neighbor, the host city of the 2002 Games has been more possessed of hospitality than atmosphere.
Park City is fun and now is a great time to purchase Park City real estate.
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