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Park City Big Trip Recap
On March 7, 38 travelers hit the road for FLSC’s 2026 big trip to beautiful Park City, Utah. Twenty-seven flew together; the other 11 made their own way to the mountain. We had a little difficulty getting off the ground in Syracuse – “we don’t have enough fuel to get to Chicago, now we have too much fuel!” – so we missed our original connection in Chicago. United did well rebooking all 27 of us onto a later flight that still got us to Salt Lake City with plenty of time for the short bus ride up to Park City before our welcome pizza party.
The Hotel Thaynes was a beautiful, recently renovated hotel about a mile outside of town. The free shuttle service worked very well, taking us to the mountain, downtown and Deer Valley almost anytime we wanted. The sun shone bright just about every day, and some of us got a raccoon-eye tan. While it was a meager snow year out west for sure, and many runs were down to the dirt and closed, we still found plenty of terrain to keep us busy. We did miss some fresh powder, though, but made the best of it.
While the primary mountain was Park City (Epic), many chose to ski at nearby Deer Valley at least one day (Ikon). Salt Lake and Park City host the 2034 Winter Olympics, and the area is already under construction to host the world. Park City was founded as a silver mining camp over 100 years ago, and many of the runs are named after that industry. Many took the free historical mine on-skis mountain tour offered. Very interesting.
We had a great optional lunch gathering on Monday, après happy hour with live music on Wednesday, and lots of time in the fabulous indoor/outdoor hot pool area. Friday was a long day skiing or touring around, then departing the hotel at 6:00pm for a couple hours and dinner in downtown Salt Lake City. At 9:00pm we headed to the airport for a late red-eye flight home. It was tiring but we were home by 1:00pm on Saturday, giving us the rest of the weekend to unpack and catch up on sleep and chores.
Many thanks to everyone who came and who helped! A trip is only as good as its participants, and everyone was great! We’ll ski the Dolomites in Italy next March!
Kelly Buck
Trip Leader
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