Park City

Park City, Utah, less than an hour away from Salt Lake City, is home to three ski resorts and near several others.  The Sundance Institute, founded by Robert Redford, is located there and presents the largest festival of independent films in January each year.  Many of the events at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games were contested in the Park City area.  The area is lush and green and looks like Colorado.

Our RV park, a pretty one, was a few miles from the town center.  We went hiking behind it, climbing hills for a panoramic view.  Here you see our campground in the foreground and the ski jump area from the Olympic games in the background.

Park City's Main Street is the longest and best street I've seen at the base of a ski area.  Lots of restaurants and shops, some of them quite upscale. 

We took the beautiful drive up to the Deer Park skiing area.  To get to the restaurants at the St. Regis Hotel, you climb aboard the funicular - a mechanism similar to the cable car at the Shadowbrook in Capitola but much grander - which takes you to the top.  There are several dining venues, all of them beautifully designed, and the executive chef is the famed Jean-George Vongerichten.  The staff is very friendly and low key for such an elegant establishment.  However, the menu was somewhat limited during the current offseason, so we passed.

We also drove to the Snowbird skiing area, about an hour away, where I once attended a medical conference, and happened to show up during a "brewfest", with good live music and the opportunity to sample a bunch of local beers.  It's an absolutely stunning area, but as Nancy said and I remembered, the lodging looks like something built in the Soviet Union.