Park City's Silver Boomtown: Mining History & the Olympic Legacy

Housed in the 1885 city jail/calaboose at 528 Main Street, this free museum traces the silver-mining boomtown that produced $400 million in ore between 1868 and the 1900s. The original two-story jail with its holding cells intact anchors a collection of mining equipment, period photographs, and artifacts from the era when Park City had 27 saloons and an opera house. Exhibits cover the labor strife, the 1898 town fire that destroyed most of the wooden buildings, the rebuilding in brick, and the long decline into a ski town before the 2002 Winter Olympic revival.

Utah's most intact Victorian commercial district runs seven blocks up a narrow canyon, with 700+ buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. The facades of the 1890s–1910s buildings — the Egyptian Theatre (1926), the Wasatch Brew Pub in the 1903 Rocky Mountain Power building, the Silver Mine Adventure — document the layered history of a town that never quite died. The Town Lift ski gondola terminal at the top of Main Street is one of the few places in America where a historic district and an operating ski area share the same address.

Built for the 2002 Winter Olympics on the edge of Park City, this 400-acre complex retains the original Nordic combined, ski jump, luge, bobsled, and skeleton tracks that hosted Olympic competition. The Alf Engen Ski Museum inside the complex tells the full history of skiing in the Wasatch — from Norwegian immigrant Engen's pioneering ski school at Alta in the 1940s through the Olympic bids and the 2002 Games. In summer, coaches run aerial ski jump training over a splash pool, and visitors can book bobsled rides on the actual Olympic track — an experience that reaches 80 mph in under a minute.

Utah's first legal distillery since Prohibition operates out of an 1896 livery stable on Park City's Main Street, a two-story stone-and-timber building that has been a car garage, a skating rink, and now the flagship of a western appellation whiskey program. High West coined the term "western appellation" to describe whiskeys finished in barrels that carry the flavors of the Wasatch environment — the Rendezvous Rye, the American Prairie Bourbon, and the Campfire blend of Scotch, rye, and bourbon are poured in the saloon beside a cast-iron stove and antler chandeliers.