Park City: Silver Mountain, Ghost Town, Ski Resort
Near Park City, Utah
Park City sits in a mountain valley in the Wasatch Range at about seven thousand feet above sea level, roughly thirty miles east of Salt Lake City by road. It began as a silver-mining boom town in the eighteen sixties and ended the nineteenth century as one of the wealthiest communities per capita in the American West. Then the mines declined, the fire of eighteen ninety-eight destroyed most of the downtown, and the great metallic wealth of the Wasatch drained away. Park City spent the first half of the twentieth century in a long, slow decline, its population falling from several thousand at the peak to well under two thousand within a few decades.
What saved it was snow. In nineteen sixty-three, a group of local residents and investors, working with the United Park City Mines company that still owned much of the mountain, persuaded the federal government to provide a land-redevelopment grant for a ski resort. Treasure Mountain Resort opened on December twenty-first, nineteen sixty-three, with what was then the longest gondola in the United States. Within a decade it was one of the most popular ski destinations in America.
The transformation from mining ghost town to world-class resort was so complete that today most visitors to Park City have no idea the mountain they ski contains miles of tunnels bored by Welsh and Cornish miners in the eighteen seventies and eighties. The historic Main Street, lined with Victorian-era buildings rebuilt after the eighteen ninety-eight fire, now houses galleries, restaurants, and boutiques where silver buyers and saloon keepers once did business. The town's mines produced millions of dollars in silver and lead. The mountain they left behind turned out to be worth more for what fell on it than for anything buried inside it.
In the winter of two thousand two, Park City hosted roughly forty percent of the events of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, completing the transformation of a nineteenth-century mining camp into one of the most recognized ski towns in the world. The Flagstaff Mine and the Ontario Mine and the old Marsac Mill are still up there on the mountain. The ski runs pass right over them.
