Today was our longest leg of the trip back to Vegas and we were really looking forward to Park City as we’d booked a lovely townhouse for the night. One night’s accommodation shouldn’t have to be so tricky.
We drove to the address on the website which turned out to only be the check-in for the townhouse. We got there during opening hours and it was closed. It turned into a bit of a treasure hunt with clues from that point on. First we found the secret code that had been hidden in our belongings to open the box on the wall outside reception. This gave us a map and a key. We found X on the map showing us the way to the townhouse. Sadly our map was out of date with the new roadworks so we had to rely on the GPS which wasn’t up-to-date either. We finally found X and the key opened the cave door to the underground carpark but not our room. We needed a pin code and suddenly we were out of clues. After knocking on the door of another guest we finally called reception, gave them our credit card number again, and were told our pin code. Our treasure hunt took over an hour! It sounds great as I read back over this but I can say that at the time I was getting very annoyed.
By the time we were settled it was time for dinner so we headed into Main Street and suddenly all our antagonism towards Park City melted away. I have never seen anything so picturesque. We were all so impressed that we headed back in for a morning of shopping and photography.
Park City started out as a mining town in the mid 1800’s after it was settled by the Mormons.
The Mormon leader instructed church members to farm the land and warned that the lure of precious metals would cause outsiders to come to Utah. In 1862 the US Army came in to protect the federal mail route. Many of the soldiers prospected the hills of Park City in their spare time and discovered silver and during a boom period became tremendously wealthy.
A fire in 1898 almost destroyed the town and when it was rebuilt it was similar to the original construction. According to the trolley driver that took us around the town, today council law states that any new building must be built in the same style and must include stone and cedar in the construction. 
In time the silver boom drew to a close and the residents turned to tourism. The area was a great resource for recreational activities and ski resorts were built with thousands of acres of perfect skiing terrain.
Park City was and is a picturesque nineteenth century mining town with a good dose of Swiss ski resort thrown in. With baskets of red and pink flowers hanging from street lamps, Main Street is compact and on a steep hill that had our lungs busting for oxygen. All the buildings are close to each other two and three storeys high. They either have balconies, flower boxes on the windows or an old 1800’s style sign hanging above the door. Despite their old world exterior the retail trade is very upmarket and caters to tourists and celebrities.
Park City’s first claim to fame, we discovered, is that it hosts the annual Sundance Film Festival founded by Robert Redford in 1981. Redford hoped that the remote setting was removed enough from the marketplace to encourage creativeness and unique ideas. The Festival is held in January, in the middle of the skiing season, and actors and directors are available to the public for questions about their movie. It wasn’t hard to imagine how pretty the city would be under a white blanket of snow, with thousands of tourists in for the ski season and the other thousands of tourists in for the celebrity spotting.
Park City’s second claim to fame is that it was the venue for the 2002 Winter Olympics and we were amazed to see the ski jump ramp and luge near our townhouse. Olympic Park is now a tourist attraction with bobsled rides, a museum, event hire for parties and conferences, sports camps and winter sports training.
