Snowbasin and the Olympic Mountain

On a November day in nineteen forty, the mayor of Ogden declared the Ogden Snow Basin winter playground officially open. The new ski area sat at the base of Mount Ogden's east face, deep in a cirque carved by glaciers, with terrain that experienced skiers immediately recognized as exceptional. For sixty years it operated as a regional ski area, well regarded and not widely famous.

Then Salt Lake City was awarded the two thousand two Winter Olympics, and the selection committee looked east from Ogden toward the mountains and identified Snowbasin as the venue for the alpine speed events: the downhill, super-G, and combined races for both men and women. These are the disciplines where the athletes reach the highest speeds, where the course design and mountain terrain matter most.

Course architect Bernhard Russi, a Swiss Olympic champion who had designed courses for Games across four decades, laid out two tracks. The men's Grizzly course ran roughly nine thousand four hundred feet in length with a vertical drop of two thousand eight hundred ninety-seven feet. The women's Wildflower course was shorter and technically different. The resort spent heavily to bring the mountain's infrastructure to Olympic standards.

When the races ran in February two thousand two, twenty-two thousand five hundred spectators watched each event. Nearly all the tickets sold.

The courses are still there. On any winter day you can ski the Grizzly and the Wildflower as public runs. The Olympic timing infrastructure is gone; the lodge facilities from the Games remain. From the top of the Grizzly course the Great Salt Lake is visible to the west, flat and pale in the basin below. The mountain has not changed. The times the athletes ran on it in February of two thousand two are still the record.