There’s a cloud hanging over Utah’s 2002 Winter Olympic Games coming up Feb. 8-24. No, it’s not another Salt Lake Organizing Committee bribery scandal. The problem is snow–too much snow.
Last February, as Snowbasin Resort prepared to host World Cup downhill and super G races almost exactly 12 months ahead of the Olympics, the snow would not stop. Seven feet of snow piled up on courses that needed to be brick hard for racing.
A foot of new powder fell overnight preceding each of three scheduled race days. Despite a heroic, nearly round-the-clock effort by 450 course workers armed with shovels and blowers, all three contests had to be canceled.
The next day, a widely distributed wire photo showed Austria’s Hermann “the Herminator” Maier, the likely favorite to win Olympic gold at Snowbasin, exploding from a chin-deep cloud of powder snow in downhill helmet and racing tights. Snowbasin’s phones lighted up with inquiries from soft-snow devotees around the country.
What will happen if a similar deluge arrives next February? Race organizers don’t dare dismiss the possibility. Utah’s Wasatch Front is a known snow magnet. Snowbasin receives an average of 400 inches a season.
Four ski mountains within an hour’s drive of downtown Salt Lake City–Alta, Snowbird, Brighton and Powder Mountain–average more than 500 inches. Fifty inches in 24 hours is not unknown in Little Cottonwood Canyon, where Alta and Snowbird are located.
Racing and jumping champion Alf Engen, who “discovered” Alta in 1936, once said with a Norwegian-troll twinkle in his eye that when big storms closed the access road, “We would be stuck up here with nothing to do but ski.”
Engen, who was denied a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in 1948 because his image had appeared on a Wheaties box, developed much of what is considered modern powder-skiing technique at Alta in the 1940s and ’50s.
Snowbasin’s race crew put a brave face on last year’s washouts. It was good practice, they said. Better it happen this year than 2002. And if it happens again, at least the downhill is scheduled on the first day of the Olympic Games. They have the full fortnight to work around the weather. They may need the time, as Nagano did in 1998 when gale-force wind and snow pushed some races well into the second week.
Whatever the weather, Salt Lake City should provide the most rugged and dramatic setting for the Winter Games since Innsbruck in 1976.
It’s easy to see why Mormon settlers in the mid-19th Century believed they had found their heaven on Earth. The airport sits right on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, which can shimmer like mercury, doubling the sky. The lake is huge, bigger than Rhode Island, and so salty–there is no outflow to the Pacific Ocean–that it stings even a slightly scraped knee and floats you like a cork.
The mountains, a kind of snowy Great Wall, bolt straight up out of the valley floor. The city sits at 4,300 feet. Five miles east of Interstate Highway 15, Lone Peak stares down on the metropolis from 11,253 feet. This suddenness is part of the reason Utah’s ski resorts get so much precipitation, averaging 50 percent more than neighboring Colorado, which is next in line for eastward-moving storms.
Downtown Salt Lake is tucked up at the base of this wall. A handful of modern skyscrapers mark the city center, but the dominant structure, architecturally and culturally, is the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its six, white-granite spires thrusting heavenward as if to challenge the peaks beyond. Every street address in the valley takes its coordinates from this point.
State is 70 percent Mormon
The church has been under fire almost since the awarding of the Olympic Games to Salt Lake in 1995. Prominent church members dominated the bid committee that caused such a furor when it handed out favors to IOC members and their families. And the church has inevitably become embroiled in debates over what it considers moral issues, such as the serving of alcohol at Olympic sites downtown.
Remember, Utah was essentially a one-sect theocracy, ruled by the charismatic Brigham Young, until it entered the Union in 1896. Today the state is still 70 percent Mormon. It is perhaps inevitable that outsiders and critics within Utah would label 2002 the “Mormon Games.”
The church is eager to dispel this notion. It has loaned the Salt Lake Organizing Committee an entire downtown block for an Olympic medals plaza and $5 million to build seating and podia.
For their part, City Council members–urged to be “good hosts” by Mayor Rocky Anderson and eager not to appear too provincial before the world–have voted to allow alcohol at a two-week-long block party in nearby Washington Square.
Partygoers will be able to see big-screen TV of Olympic competition, listen to local bands on stage, watch children sculpting snow and eat at a food fair–all with drink in hand.
More liberal Park City awaits
Visitors shouldn’t have any trouble finding a drink at the skiing venues. The town of Park City, which will host alpine giant slalom and all of the snowboarding events, has always lived outside the Mormon sphere. It was a silver-mining town, and Brigham Young frowned on the search for “treasure.”
Four hundred million dollars worth of silver came out of Park City’s rounded hills. At one time the Victorian main street roared with 27 saloons. Prohibition was openly mocked. The 10,000 Swedes and Finns, Cornishmen, Scots and Yugoslavs who worked the mines in the 1890s were decidedly not there for spiritual reasons.
Modern Park City has kept its rambunctious character. It is by far the biggest winter resort in Utah, spilling out of its shoehorn valley into sprawling subdivisions and sagebrush golf courses. Trophy homes hide in the aspen woods.
In January, bicoastal “people in black,” as the locals call them, invade as the Sundance Film Festival comes to town. Skiers and independent filmmakers mix in the dark in the antique Egyptian Theater on Main Street.
Just a mile away from Park City’s slopes, Deer Valley has made its reputation for over-the-top luxury, pampering on the slopes and off. Uniformed valets remove your skis from the car rack for you. Lunch at the Stein Eriksen Lodge, ski boots and all, is a white-linen, silver-service, sit-down affair. During the night, fleets of snow machines groom the runs to what is known in the trade as a corduroy finish, “the king’s cloth.”
Just around the mountain shoulder from Deer Valley, the cross-country races, including shoot-and-ski biathlon, will go off at a new venue in Soldier Hollow. The trails themselves are spanking new, complete with snowmaking and an arena for spectators.
But the surrounding country, including the towns of Heber City and Midway, fit an older Utah quilt. This is orderly, irrigated farm country with neat fields and small towns organized around the church.
Everywhere they went, the pioneers planted Lombardy poplars, or “Mormon trees,” in rows along ditches and fence lines. The great chronicler of the West, Wallace Stegner, likened them to the people, “spare and straight, with their roots in the earth and branches reaching heavenward.”
You won’t find much in the way of lodging out here. The athletes will bus over each day from the Olympic Village on the campus of the University of Utah. Most tourists come February will stay in the valley, too, where something like 17,000 rooms will be available from Ogden in the north to Provo to the south. Hotel rooms, private homes, B&Bs and motel rooms have all been logged into the Web site at www.saltlake2002.com.
Don’t plan on booking rooms at Snowbasin for the glamorous speed events, the downhills and super Gs. There aren’t any–not yet, anyway. (Visitors who want to bed close by can stay in Ogden, 20 miles down the canyon.) Before the Olympics came to town, Snowbasin was treading water as a locals’ hill, a very fine hill with few locals taking advantage of it.
A loyal cadre of Ogdenites and destination skiers, yours truly included, knew about the area’s tremendous powder and voluptuous, timberline terrain. Salt Lake City skiers, spoiled by the close-in excellence at Alta and Park City, rarely bothered to make the one-hour drive north to Snowbasin.
Then Salt Lake won its bid to host 2002 (on its fifth try, dating back to the 1960s), and Snowbasin’s potential came to the fore. Alta and Snowbird were eliminated early on as potential venues because of their environmental sensitivity. That left Snowbasin as the only mountain tall enough to host the downhills.
The area’s owner, oil man Earl Holding, used the Olympic imperative to force a controversial land swap with the U.S. Forest Service that gives him enough private land at the base of the mountain to build, eventually, an upscale village with hotels, condos and golf courses.
None of which, critics point out, is necessary for staging the Olympic races. In any case, Holding has spent lavishly on the mountain with the addition of two gondolas, one high-speed chair lift and one tram (to the top of the men’s downhill course).
Plenty of room to ski
Each white gondola car is emblazoned with the name and national flag of an Olympic champion. You may climb on board the car named for Tommy Moe (Lillehammer, 1994) or Bernhard Russi (Sapporo, 1972). Chances are you’ll be alone for the ride. It’s eerie but fun–all of this new infrastructure and there’s still nobody skiing at Snowbasin.
Ironically, this may also be the case at other Utah ski areas during the Olympic Games. Skiers tend to stay away during the perceived madness of the Olympic fortnight.
There may, in fact, be no better time to ski Utah powder. Last February at Snowbasin, Russi, the dashing Swiss who has designed each of the last four Olympic downhill courses, waxed philosophical about the World Cup cancellations:
“We have two hearts,” he said as snow poured down outside a temporary press trailer. “One is ski racing, and one is we are skiers. I’m going to get my fat skis and go ski powder in the trees.”
IF YOU GO
THE DETAILS
For tickets or information on the Olympic Games, visit www.saltlake2002.com.
More than 85 percent of tickets have been sold, but prime tickets still may be available through ticket and lodging packages at the official ticketing supplier, www.tickets.com. Ticket packages recently ranged from $2,000 to $4,000. Lodging packages that included tickets ranged from $2,510 to $10,810.
Prime tickets also are being auctioned on eBay with proceeds benefiting the Salt Lake 2002 Paralympic Winter Games. A sampling of recent prices included $1,650 for ice hockey tickets, $785 for speed skating and $455 for snowboarding. Check availability at www.saltlake2002.com or www.ebay.com.
For information on Utah skiing this winter, visit www.utahskiing.org, the official site of the Utah Winter Association, or www.utah.com, the official site of the Utah Travel Council. The council also can be reached at 800-200-1160.
———-
Peter Shelton is a columnist for Ski magazine and an observer of Utah ski history since 1967.
