Eating Salt Lake City
Staying in Salt Lake City (or Valley) is an excellent option to explore Alta, Snowbird, Solitude and Brighton. Ski City USA offers good value (many hotels include a Super Pass with the room), public transportation to the resorts, and a broad range of restaurants and entertainment venues.
Here are some favorites. Check websites for hours and addresses.
Breakfast
For a quickie on the way to the mountain, Tulie Bakery or Eva’s Bakery, downtown serve excellent baked goods.
Sweet Lake Biscuits and Limeade is more leisurely. Egg dishes with house made biscuits and gravy are worth the visit.
Lunch and/or Dinner
Spitz serves fresh and substantial salads and first-rate doner kebab.
Most repeat SLC visitors head for Red Iguana, the venerable and superb Mexican not far from downtown. The downside is no reservations for small parties and long waits. Go around 8:00PM to avoid crowds.
On weekends Dim Sum House serves dim sum that stands up to similar places in San Francisco and New York. It’s large, loud and delicious.
For Vietanmese pho and banh mi sandwiches try one of the Oh Mai locations. One of the better Thai places is Skewered Thai.
Scattered around the valley are numerous local counter-service fast food hamburger places with names like Hires and Astro Burger. A favorite is Crown Burgers.
No one leaves The Copper Onion unhappy, unless they had an overly long wait. Avoid the line with a reservation. The American cuisine is consistently excellent. A block away is Taqueria 27 serving gourmet Latin street food and tequilas.
Several Japanese restaurants are available. My favorite is Kyoto. It has a friendly and fresh sushi bar.
For wonderful Indian or Nepalese food in an attractive location visit Himalayan Kitchen.
Among the pizza places, Settebello is within walking distance of most downtown locations. The Pie near the University of Utah requires a car. It is underground and abuzz with students.
If you’re in the mood for a beer and burger, Lucky 13 is one of several options. It’s a dive bar where you’ll get a glimpse of a colorful segment of locals. The Garage is a set on the edge of the gasworks on the north edge of town. Interesting bar food and live music.
Entertainment
There’s a lot of it in SLC, a stop for most touring groups. When checking listings for downtown venues, don’t overlook free Thursday evening concerts at Gallivan Center. The Excellence in the Community series showcases local talent. I’ve never been disappointed.
There’s Silver In Them Thar Hills!
Park City: Visit Silver Mining Museum Sites On Skis.
California-Comstock mine shaft entrance
is on the tour. Credit: Tamsin Venn
Led by Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort guides, the new Silver to Slopes tour skis you to various relics of the mining history scattered throughout beautiful scenery. More than 1,000 miles of tunnels lie beneath the slopes here.
We ride up the McConkey Express with our amiable guide Jim Brown. He notes the tunnels buried beneath the lift once served to drain water from mining operations. Yikes.
“There are some things that can go wrong when you are skiing Park City, Utah, but falling down a mine shaft is not one of them,” says Jim reassuringly. (They are all capped. EPA tests the tailings every summer.)
Brown, an effortless skier and keen historian, has brought along a briefcase of old photos to further illustrate the tour. He is one of those transplants (from Florida) who skied Park City on vacay and never left. Ditto our sweep, Debrinne Ferguson from Los Gatos, Calif.,
In 1963, United Park City Mines, the last active operation in Park City, opened Treasure Mountain Resort on the 3,700 acres it owned. Relying on mining engineering know-how, it put up J-bars, a gondola, and even a Skier’s Subway. The segue from silver mining to ski mecca is evident all around you.
First stop is the Silver King Mine’s Head Frame Building, at the base of the Bonanza Express, closed in only 1953. Miners started digging the 1,450-foot-deep shaft in 1890. The only female mine owner, socialite Susanna Bransford, alias the Silver Queen, made her fortune here. You can ski her nearby namesake trail.
Next stop the King Con Mine Ore Bin sitting to one side of Claimjumper. The Silver King Consolidated Mine, not to be confused with Silver King Mine, built the 1,800-foot deep Bogan Shaft here. The nearby King Con lift serves an intermediate’s paradise and is named for the mining company, not the giant gorilla, as many think.
We ride the Silverlode Express past the Quicksilver Gondola, which has linked Park City to The Canyons as part of Vail Resort’s recent $57 million upgrade. At the new Miner’s Camp restaurant here, The Pickaxe Pub displays authentic ore picks, in keeping with the general theme.
Next we ride McConkey’s Express to access the Georgeanna trail that follows the ridge past one of the best views on the mountain: Mt. Timpanogos (11,753 feet), Heber Valley, the town of Park City, the Uinta Mountains, and the top of Deer Valley’s Lady Morgan chairlift.
Mid-Mountain Lodge was once a boarding house for miners (1897) and relocated from the bottom of the mountain to save it from demolition.
Credit: Tamsin Venn
We stop at Mid Mountain Lodge, once a boarding house for Silver King miners (1897), next used by the U.S. Ski Team (1973-75), now a popular lunch spot. Scheduled for demolition, a group of locals had it hauled up the mountain to this spot in 1987. Hurray for recycling.
At the bottom of Thaynes lift is the famous California-Comstock Mine and 1,700 feet below via the Thaynes Shaft is the West End Tunnel where skiers used to ride the Skier Subway to access the Thaynes lift in the early days of Treasure Mountain. The ride took about 25 minutes. Most skiers did it once for the novelty, once for the kids, and that was it, notes Brown. Here’s a video of what has to have been the most unusual lift in ski country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1aUSYfvehE
The two-hour tour takes place on intermediate trails and departs daily from the Eagle statue in Park City Mountain Village at 10 a.m. and from the Bonanza Summit trail map at 1 p.m. Just show up. The tour also helps you get oriented at this mega resort. Donate to preservation efforts at Friends of Ski Mining History.
For more information, ParkCityMountain.com
The Pickaxe Pub with display of vintage tools is a good place to wrap up the tour.
Credit: Tamsin Venn
Seriously Injured? High Fives Has A Program For You
A Community That Can Help You To Get Back To Athleticism.
What if you suffer a life altering brain, spinal or physically limiting injury and want to ski again? Where do you turn? One place is the High Fives Foundation started by Ray Tuscany who was a ski racer who broke his back.
After his injury, he founded High Fives to help create a community to get a skier (but it could be anyone or any athlete) through the recovery process. Tuscany is emphatic when he says High Fives doesn’t have clients or customers, they have athletes!
According to Tuscany, once you have clearance from your doctor and are in the best shape possible, they will help find the funding to get you back on the slopes. The foundation works with the rehab staff to create a plan and a budget for each athlete. To help achieve the athlete’s goals, it provides the financial support—typical grants average around $5,000—to help cover the expenses for adaptive equipment, training, and other bits and pieces to get you skiing again. The foundation pays the providers directly so they can accurately track and report back to their donors where and how the money was spent.
The organization is certified to operate in all fifty states and is headquartered in Truckee, CA. It has offices in Reno and Sugarbush, VT as well.
High Fives also has another program to help disabled vets learn to ski. Through its Military to the Mountains program, each year twenty-two injured veterans are selected by the Adaptive Training Foundation in Dallas and taken through a nine-week program to restore, recalibrate and re-deploy these injured warriors. Many become Paralympians.
For more information, contact Roy Tuscany at the High Fives Foundation at www.highfivesfoundation.org or at (530) 562 4270.
For vets who are interested in what the Adaptive Training Foundation has to offer, their web site is www.adaptivetrainingfoundation.org or you can call them at 214.432.1070.
Military To Mountains participants are ramped up for event at Squaw Valley.
Credit: HighFive
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