Park City

Last year on our trip I wrote about how Deas made fun of me because every place we visited became my “new favorite!” part of the trip. I’ve loved a lot of places we’ve been so far this year, but I hadn’t yet had that real excitement of just absolutely falling in love with a new place. Well, I’ve fallen in love again this trip – this time with Park City, Utah!

We stayed at Jordanelle State Park, which is a fantastic state park. I just realized when I started writing this post that I neglected to take any pictures of it, but trust me – it was great. Right on a lake with easy access to Park City – and full hook-ups to boot. We liked it and the area so much, we stayed for 8 nights! (Updated: I should clarify that the majority of the spots in the park are water/electric only. There is one loop with full hook-ups, but in the summer it is used by camp hosts/camp workers. If you get there before the season starts like we did, you can use the full hook-up sites.)

Park City was recently named the Best Town in America by Outside Magazine – and it didn’t take us long to see why. Loads of outdoor activities, beautiful scenery, a historic downtown, friendly people, good restaurants – I could go on and on! We spent our first day walking along the Rail Trail, a 30-mile trail that runs right through town. In certain places the trail goes under the road, and each tunnel had interesting murals painted on the inside.

In addition to the murals, there was lots of other cool stuff to see along the Rail Trail. There was an area called the Sound Garden, with large installations of home-made instruments, which you could play with and make all kinds of interesting sounds.

In another area there were several sculptures by artist Scotty Soltronic that were all created from items that were either found or reclaimed.

There was even a large tree full of old shoes!

One on off the side streets off of Main Street, there is a painting by the famous London street artist Banksy. It is now covered in glass, because it was vandalized late last year, presumably by a local disgruntled artist.

Even the benches had character!

There isn’t any skiing going on right now, but all of the ski trails are open for use as hiking trails during the spring and summer, and we hiked a few of them. We got some great views back down towards the city and of the ski lifts.

 

 

We even ran into some snow on some of the higher parts of the trails.

Atop one of the trails was this seemingly abandoned and decaying building. We couldn’t quite tell if it had been a home or some sort of ski shelter.

After one of our hikes we just spent some time walking through the town looking at all of the beautiful homes.

While we were walking through town we kept seeing people running by in crazy costumes. There was a charity run going on that afternoon, and we ended up having lunch at a cute restaurant called The Bridge, where we could see other runners as they came by.

Park City is very dog-friendly too – one local told us that people refer to it as “Bark City.” The dogs joined us for lunch at The Bridge restaurant.

We had drinks one night at High West distillery, which is a favorite of several of our friends.

And lastly, one afternoon we drove over the nearby Sundance Resort area, where we hiked a portion of the Timpanogos Trail.

Driving back from Sundance we saw this lovely old barn. It was originally built it 1902, and we were very impressed with its condition until we read the sign that said it had been rebuilt in 2002 after collapsing under heavy snow in 1996.

Sorry for the long post, but we just absolutely loved this stay and had so much to share. In fact we liked it so much, we filled out an application to be camp hosts at Jordanelle next summer! We’ll also try to come back through here later this summer on our way back to Florida.