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Travel The Other Side of the Mountain

Powder Trip: It’s all about snow-500" a year-at Utah’s Snowbird Resort in the soon-to-be famous Wasatch Mountains.
By Mary Brown Malouf |

WERE LOST MUCH OF THE TIME.

My friend Debbie and I had W Wcome to Utah to ski and we spent hours, it seemed, crossing miles of terrain, up and down, most of it looking just like the place we left, with a magnificent view of the snow-covered mountains opening up before us at every (wrong) turn.

Unfortunately, we were lost in the lobby of the Cliff Lodge at Snowbird Ski Resort.

Our skis were in our hands instead of on our feel and we were clunking in that astronaut-ski boot walk across yards of Persian carpets trying to find our way to the lift.

Snowbird is in the fat middle of the bell curve of Utah ski resorts-it’s not glitzy, it’s not exclusive, it’s geared to families and groups of friends who simply love to ski. There’s a glitzy restaurant, an ice rink, several video arcades, and a couple of coffee stops. There are units to buy, to time-share, and to rent by the day or week. There are miles of halls and acres of plate glass that look straight out on the Christmas-card slopes. Yes, there’s a spa-isn’t “resort” a code word for spa?-and two pools. We found both while searching for the ski lift and briefly considered a dip instead of a slide, but that would have meant finding our rooms again because outfits are everything on a ski trip and we were in ours for skiing. Finally, we tromped across the kiddy slope, dodging beginning boarders and expert babies on skis, jammed on to the gondola lift with 20 other people and were whisked to the top of the mountain.

It was downhill from there.

Snowbird is an Albanian-looking (massive, gray, modern) resort up Little Cottonwood Canyon, high in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest of Utah, where the snow, they say, is the best powder in the world. The world will get to see that powder all over their TV screens in 2002, when the Winter Olympic Games are scheduled to take place in Salt Lake City. We saw the powder all over our goggles whenever we tumbled. Luckily, a series of warm spring days created almost perfect ski conditions^-even for a couple of Texans who are admittedly more comfortable on the bunny slopes at Santa Fe.

Snowbird, we discovered in short order, is a bit sleeper than our trembling legs were prepared for. Still, the runs offered a beautifully planned mix of trails that opened to enormous bowls of perfectly packed snow- Snowbird averages 500 inches a year.

By the second day. we had promoted ourselves (by taking wrong turns) to intermediate and advanced level runs. It was obvious thai getting to the slopes was more perilous than negotiating the steep terrain.

Texans don’t really frequent Snowbird as much as they do closer (Colorado) and more glamorous (Alta) resorts, but that’s likely to change once coverage of the Olympics begins. For now. it’s a huge semi-hidden gem with programs and instruction and slopes for beginners to seniors, many of than family-oriented. The extended season (well into April), its proximity to Sail Lake City (under an hour’s drive), and its interesting runs with more high-speed chair lifts than we could count made us wonder why the crowds were so light. We were told the natives were all skied-out tor the season, which runs from October to May. Imagine. We were somewhat skied-out after a couple of days, at least that’s what our legs were telling us. but it could have been the added fatigue of hiking from our rooms to the lifts that made us feel like ski-wimps instead of ski bunnies.

Our room had the same view of huge. snowy mountains that we’d been looking at all day, from inside the lodge and out on the slopes. At Snowbird, the mountains are inescapable-even the bathroom had a glass wall that looked through the bedroom and out the window so you could enjoy the view while you soaked your tired muscles.

Snowbird Resort founded by over-achieving Texan Dick Bass (no relation to those Fort Worth basses) who helped build Vail in 1%2 with some extra change from his family’s oil and ranching businesses. Seven years later, he began to develop Snowbird, and in his spare time, he reached his mountaineering goal of being the first man to scale the highest peaks on each of the seven continents, which, by the way, happened to mean he was the oldest man (at age 55) to climb Mt. Everest. Then he refocused on Snowbird and expanded Cliff Lodge into a 532-room hotel with a 44,000 square foot conference center and a 27,000 square foot spa. He has even bigger plans in mind: a performing arts theater, a competition-sized ice rink, an 18-hoIe golf course, and a couple of mountaintop restaurants. After that half-billion-dollar baby is delivered, Bass dreams of expanding the resort into a “Center tor Human Understanding” for the development of mind, body, and spirit.

Whew.

Snowbird is a pure resort-it’s designed as a world unto itself. Sail Lake City is only 25 miles away, but-except for one restaurant-there’s not much reason to go there. It’s not the cultural mecca that Aspen is, it doesn’t have the dining options that Vail does, and even the shopping opportunities are limited, although you can get a really cool miniature model of the LDS Temple at the ZCMI (Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution) Mall. (The coolest stuff we found to buy was right at die resort in the Marco Polo gift shop, where they had a nice selection of YiXing teapots. Not exactly a typical ski souvenir, but it ties in to the resort’s Eastern inflection.) If you want to venture beyond Snowbird for dinner, though, there are two places to go.

Salt Lake City has one good restaurant. Scott Blackerby, once upon a time chef at Nana Grill in Dallas is in charge of Bambara, a dining room in the recently restored Hotel Monaco in downtown Salt Lake.

The hottest destination is Sundance. Canyons radiate from Salt Lake City like fingers from a hand-you have to backtrack down the road to go up another canyon. But we had heard about the Tree Room at Sundance and were determined to eat there. Young chef Trey Foshee won Food & Wine’s award for one of the Top Ten Best New Chefs in America two years ago-the first time a Utah chef has been so recognized. Chef Jason Knibb follows suit, bringing in chefs from fine restaurants nationwide.

Sundance is synonymous with Robert Redford, of course, but the place itself is far from star-struck. The buildings are as rustic as summer camp and the restaurant is comfortably lodge-like with big fires in rock fireplaces and deep banquettes. Foshee. and now Knibb, is not just in charge of the kitchen; he’s also head gardener. Sundance grows most of its own fruits, vegetables, greens, and herbs-organically, of course-and the kitchen and the farm work in tandem to bring California-quality cuisine to the mountains. By the way, Utah liquor laws are baroque, but not insurmountable, and all the fine food we ate was accompanied by equally fine wine. We even indulged in a snifter of cognac to sip by the fire. We stepped back into the cold night, looking forward to the drive from Sundance to Snowbird and enjoying the wild Wasatch countryside without worrying about whether some of it was going to end up in our face.

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