Park City, Utah

I love watching the Winter Olympics.

I love figure skating, curling, skiing, snowboarding, hockey, luge, bobsledding, and especially ice dancing. Because of the intensity of the excitement I get to experience every four years, I’ve made it a semi-informal practice to visit the sites of Olympic Villages when I’m in a city that has hosted the Games. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to see the sites of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Next on my list? Pyeongchang, South Korea, which hosted the 2018 Winter Games.

In early December 2018, Matt and I took a short weekend trip to visit our favorite Utahans who live near Salt Lake City. On a clear, cold Saturday morning, we woke up and headed into the mountains. The sky was piercing blue and we Tennesseans loved watching the white mountaintops fly by on the drive up.

Our first order of business (after grabbing breakfast burritos, of course) was touring the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Park City.

I was in a kind of heaven. The Park City Olympic Village features an interactive museum with tons of information about the 2002 Games and the various sports and winners.

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The Alf Engen Ski Museum traces the history of winter sports in Park City, with exhibits displaying the ski suits worn by former athletes and videos explaining how snow works! At the museum, we rode an interactive simulator that let us feel what it was like to go heli-skiing.

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The second floor of the museum contains memorabilia from the 2002 Games. The floats and costumes used in the Opening Ceremony hang from the ceilings and glass cases display gold, silver, and bronze medals for each sport.

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During the winter season, the park opens itself up for a host of snowy activities: bobsled rides down an icy track that’s 1335 meters long; tubing down a Nordic jump (which I learned was essentially a ski jump used during the Games); zip lines down the mountainside; and a ropes course. We also learned that national ski teams often use this site to practice on the Nordic and aerial jumps.

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Watching the Olympics is always inspiring, and I left feeling very uplifted and ready to tackle my own winter sport: sledding! Matt and I, along with our friends, trekked up a snowy embankment on a roadside that Park City officials had carved out using leftover soil from a nearby construction project: FCD Hill.

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Sledding on this site was really laid-back and free, which was perfect for someone with a bum knee (read: me). We grabbed our plastic Walmart sleds and spent an hour racing each other down the slopes. Other than a few children, we were the only people out on the hill.

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With frozen fingers and toes, we packed up the car and drove into Park City for hot chocolate and pizza.

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If you’re not familiar, Park City is a classic winter ski village, bordered by Deer Valley Ski Resort (which is where I learned to ski when I was 15!) and Park City Mountain Resort. The Wasatch Mountains gleam in the background. Although Park City is probably best known for its variety of winter sports and helping play host to the 2002 Olympics, it’s also the home of the annual Sundance Film Festival.

Because it was only twenty degrees outside, we spent our visit to Park City hurrying in and out of art galleries and boutiques, and admiring the views and Christmas lights from coffee shop windows.

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By the end of the day, we were all shivering from the cold, but luckily we were headed towards a fantastic place to warm up: the Homestead Crater.

The Homestead Crater is a geothermal spring at the Midway Utah Resort, which sits about half an hour south of Park City. (If you know me and Matt, you know that we love geothermal springs).

The spring is hidden within a fifty-five-feet-tall, volcano-shaped limestone rock with a large hole at the top of the dome. The Homestead Crater is over 10,000 years old, forming from the melting snow runoff of the Wasatch Mountains. As the snow melted below the surface, the earth’s hot core heated the water, and now keeps it continuously warm. Minerals percolating upwards from this process gradually formed the limestone deposit that formed the crater. The average temperature in the crater ranges from 90-96 degrees Fahrenheit. 

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At sixty-five feet deep, the Homestead Crater is the only warm scuba diving destination in the United States: it’s where our friends learned how to scuba dive, and it’s where we enjoyed a therapeutic forty-minute soak in this mineral-rich hot spring (life jackets included for ultimate relaxation).

After changing out of our swimsuits, it was amazing that we had enough energy for the drive back to Salt Lake City. Once we returned home, we feasted on pumpkin bread and hot soup and watched Home Alone 2—the perfect end to a wintry day!