5 days in Park City, 1 night in Denver

 I landed in Salt Lake City on Wednesday evening and called a car to get out to Park City as soon as possible. I got to the house my coworkers and I rented for the long weekend to find it freshly stocked with 96 beers and an assortment of breakfast foods, snacks, and a bottle of High West whiskey. Only 2 of the other 11 guys had arrived so far, but we figured that in order to make the most of the weekend, we had to get started right away. We cracked open the bottle of whiskey and got to drinking. 

An hour and three glasses later, the three of us walked up to High West's saloon on Main St to meet up with another guy for dinner. I got my first taste of historic Park City, walking past wood sided houses that likely built in the silver rush era interspersed with modern homes designed to look like they might have been built back then. 

One stuck out to me. It was in the process of being remodeled. The wood was rotting and crumbling in places. The back half of the roof was missing. It didn't have any doors or windows and the interior was powdered with snow. Most of all, it was jacked up on pylons in the middle of a 20 foot pit. Pylons were stacked like jenga pieces under the load bearing beams of the house. New concrete poured at the bottom of the pit indicated that someone had decided this house needed a new foundation and put a lot of money into doing so while preserving the house itself. 

How could that possibly be worth it? I thought to myself. 

Dinner was nice. I had a few beers and a whiskey flight and a bowl of so-called jambalaya that would not be mistaken for jambalaya anywhere that people expect to order jambalaya . It was good, but I went to bed that night a little drunker than I planned on, and a little hungry still. 

Laying in bed, I thought forward to the snowboard lesson I had to wake up at 7am for. Was the drinking and the food worth it? I thought, and drifted off into shitty sleep. 

As expected, I was more than slightly hungover the next morning, but I got up with my alarm (the regular one I have set for work), gulped down water, coffee, eggs, and a banana and made my way to the Park City Mountain Resort. 

I've never been snowboarding before, but I have been skiing twice, and I used to longboard down garages in high school and college, so I was pretty sure I wouldn't be falling flat on my ass all day. I knew, thought, that none of that experience would map one to one onto a new discipline so I signed up for a lesson. 

The instructor gave us baby steps to work up from complete beginners to going down the newbie slope by ourselves in just a few hours. He was able to quickly point out what we were each doing wrong and give little pointers that might make it easier. Without a doubt, taking the time and spending the money on a lesson was worth it. 

Despite my best efforts to follow directions, though, there's only so much you can do to control a board sliding on snow without a lot of experience, which is to say that I fell down a lot. So much. On a run which I knew was going to be one of the last runs of the morning, I flipped over somehow and landed hard on my shoulder. It knocked the wind out of me and my neck felt weird turning to look down the mountain. I made it down, but slowly this time, and decided to call on some wisdom I learned at a motorcycle racing school. 

By definition, any injury serious to prevent you from doing an activity has to happen on the last run of the day. So just skip the last one. Go until you've got one more in you, and call it quits. 

Instead, I ditched the rest of the students and went back to the rental house to take a nap and sit in the hot tub for a little while. Worth it. 

The next morning I went out again, but with a little more sleep in me (no alarm this time) and a very, very sore lower body. Both butt cheeks felt bruised and my thighs were burning just walking up the hill to the lifts. 

As soon as I strapped in, I could tell it was going to be harder than the previous day, but I went up anyway. I've already paid for the day on the lifts, so I might as well get something out of it. 

View from the lift

Turns out that "something" was two big falls, the last of which saw me nearly rolling backwards over my head, with only my neck preventing me going all the way. I came to rest on my back, with my board on the uphill side and my arms spread out like I was trying to make a snow angel. I was not trying to make a snow angel. 

I tried working on just sliding down the hill with the board perpendicular. I didn't even feel like I had the confidence or the muscles to do that without crashing, and sure enough I didn't. I came to another stand still, but this time on my knees, and noticing that my shoulders were also in a lot of pain. I thought to myself that this was not worth it, and decided to head back to the house again ASAP. 

It seemed unlikely that I would feel differently the next morning, so I went ahead and returned the board to the rental place altogether, resolved just to have a quiet day more or less on my own. 

That night I got dinner with my coworkers. Dinner was fine, but afterwards one of the guys was really pushing to go downtown to a bar where supposedly we wouldn't have trouble getting in. Friday nights are apparently big party nights in Park City and even this tiny bar had us waiting a few minutes before letting us in. When we got in line, I was a little ambivalent about whether it would be a good time inside. 

My fears were confirmed almost as soon as I stepped inside. It was overcrowded, too loud, and too expensive. My eyes were already starting to droop, so I left on my own and went to bed early(ish). Worth it. 

For my last full day, I just walked around a lot to see what I could find. There’s an old rail line that’s been converted to a walking/biking trail. Lots of people were walking their dogs or running. It was beautiful out. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. It was chilly enough that I wasn’t sweating from walking up and down hills, but not so cold that I had to keep my hands in my pockets. 

I stopped over at the local museum. Park City was one of the only non-Mormon cities in Utah for a long time. It was established as a mining town in the 1800’s in an attempt to reduce the political control that the Mormons held. After WWII, mining dried up and it transitioned to a resort town. At least one mineshaft was converted to the first (only?) underground ski lift. It’s no longer operational.

Bike trail

Art on the bike trail

Art?

I wouldn’t have done either of those things if I had gone out snowboarding again. Worth it. 

Overnight it started snowing. The guy I had arranged to take me to the airport canceled on me at 4am. At 7:30, Uber and Lyft both agreed that no one wanted to be driving in the rough weather. At 9:15 I finally managed to get a cab to take me to Salt Lake City Airport, and made it through security to my gate with over a half hour to spare. Cost a lot of money, but seemed worth it. 

The flight was “under weight restriction” so they were offering people up to $1500 in travel vouchers to skip the flight. I was tired and really wanted to get home. I didn’t think it would be worth it. As the plane took off, I got a text saying my connection in Denver was canceled and it dawned on me that getting bumped might have been worth it. 

Sure enough when we landed in Denver, my flight was canceled and all other flights to Chicago that day were full. I didn’t want to bother trying to fly stand by. I got a room in the airport hotel (kinda worth it), took the train downtown (worth it), ate a delicious burger (worth it), and saw The Batman (not worth it) before getting to bed around midnight to wake up at 4 the next morning to make my 7am flight. After one more layover in Vegas ($100 on black? Nah not worth it), I was back in Chicago. Finally.

So was the long weekend worth it? Maybe. Maybe not. But if I spend my life looking backward for validation, I’m gonna be disappointed quite often, evidently. 

Was deciding to go the right choice? Definitely. 

The old hospital and new construction peeping over the hill