Chicken Rosoff remembers the wee hours of the morn at the television station in Old Town, scribbling the weather in dry erase markers on a United States map. In a pinch, she gleaned the day’s forecast by sticking her head out studio window at 614 Main Street. If it was going to be a big powder day for skiers, Rosoff donned a chicken hat on air, to spice up her weather report.

That was once upon a time, 20 years ago, when Park City Television, or PCTV, was known as Channel 45, and long before the slick footage of world-class athletes and award-winning Sundance Film Festival interviews on “In The Can.” This Saturday, the station will invite the community to reminisce about the past two decades with an afternoon celebration at The Canyons Resort and quite a few can remember quite a lot.

In 1987, it was hardware store clamp lights, a hand-me-down camera from KSL and KPCW radio personalities Leslie Thatcher, Blair Feulner and Rick Brough. Later, the station moved to 614 Main Street, and volunteer forces from Bill Coleman’s real estate office downstairs joined in (Rosoff, Coleman’s receptionist at the time, recalls quickly running to work shortly after the weather.)

In those days, the daily three hours of original morning programming were replayed throughout the day, accompanied by static advertisements printed on slides and ski films by Warren Miller.

Peg Bodell, a graphic designer with an office in the Old Town station, co-hosted shows with Thatcher. “Leslie did the hard news I was really the Jane Pauley of Park City,” she jokes.

The small, local character of the station opened doors, according to Bodell. She remembers interviewing Bonnie Raitt and Carole King, and James Cotton, whom she says invented an original song about her on the spot. “People would give us a break,” Bodell says. “They related to our small town.”

Coleman, the original founder of the station who put the antennae on the roof with his own hands, remembers Democratic presidential candidate Bruce Babbitt in 1988. Babbitt used his interview with Feulner to hone his on-air interview skills, he says, and the same was true for members of the U.S. Ski Team who needed to practice public speaking. “It became an incubator for all kinds of things,” Colemen explains.

On the other side of the lens, the station also gave people in town a chance to try their hand at television production. Bodell’s daughter, Fundyn Woolf, for example, had her first taste of television production Channel 45, and now works as a technician for KSL.

But Coleman says the initial idea behind beginning a television station was to introduce a live and spontaneous forum for community discussion — something that he felt was lacking. “The town was missing that two-way dialogue,” he says.

Unfortunately for Coleman, the station was a financial loss and he sold it, with the hope that it would live on to become something like it is today, in more experienced hands. “When I started I knew zip about television production,” Coleman admits.

The torch was eventually passed to Stanton Jones, the station’s current owner, who has run PCTV for the past nine years.

A veteran of Salt Lake City’s Fox station, Jones was called in by Park City Media Group, who ran the station after Coleman, to assess Park City Television’s worth in 1998.

“After two months of working with Park City Media Group, they asked me, ‘should we keep it?'” he remembers. “I said, yes, and not only that, but I’ll be your partner’ My vision was that Park City could support a better product and that people would watch if we had better content and better equipment.”

In 2000, Jones bought his partners out.

Jones calls the last decade PCTV’s “big growth years.” Since Jones took the reins, the station has increased its coverage to include Channel 102, Channel 17 and UHF Channel 45, a channel on Comcast On-Demand and online at www.parkcity.tv. PCTV currently has the capacity to reach more than 1.2 million viewers along the Wasatch Front, north in the Ogden area and south in Provo and west in Grantsville and Tooele. Viewers can also tune in from the east, in Evanston, Wyo.

Jones recalls looking to KSL to refine the Park City Television product. To eliminate the grainy image in 2000, he introduced new cameras and a new transmitter, the same models he saw KSL using. He also hired more staff, with more experience, and increased the station’s coverage of sporting and entertainment events.

“I remember I heard people were turning on our station like a radio station to listen to the music,” he says. “My reply was: ‘but we’re not a radio station. We’re a television station. Let’s go out and shoot more.'”

Today, the station markets itself as “High Altitude Entertainment.”

Programming now features a two-hour “Mountain Morning Show” and a “Mountain Midday Show,” an afternoon segment hosted by Ori Hoffer called “Mountain Views,” filmed at the current studio on Park Ave., and how-to programs for sports from skiing to fly fishing. The station additionally airs performances by local and visiting bands, in-depth Sundance Film Festival reports on workshops, celebrities and parties, and broadcasts of Miners Football games and snow sport competitions at Utah resorts.

The result is an entertainment and recreation-driven station, supported with content from the greater resort television network PCTV is affiliated with, Resort Sports Network (RSN), which includes resorts from around the country.

PCTV won two Emmy Awards in 2006, two in 2005 and this year dominated at RSN’s 11th Annual Arc Awards, claiming nine awards for their programming, promotion, marketing, ratings and branding.

In the cards for PCTV’s future? To continue keeping up with state of the art technologies used at bigger stations. Jones reports PCTV is currently in the process of acquiring new HD cameras for the fall, with plans to broadcast in HD within the next decade. In five years, Jones predicts viewers won’t stand for standard definition, and viewers he’d like to keep — especially the ones right around the corner.

“We really dominate with tourists, and we’ve become part of their experience when they visit town,” Jones says. “But we also appeal to locals, since tourists are really wannabe locals anyway We’re adamant about being a mountain station.”

Park City Television’s 20th Birthday Bash

*What: a celebration of Park City television’s two decades on air, including live music, giveaways including Eco Moto, Bubble & Bee Gifts and Silver Mountain Sports Club Memberships.

*Who: Bands performing will include the Soul Survivors, the Matt Lewis Band, Salty Rootz and Medicine Circus.

Where: The Canyons Resort,

*When: Saturday, September 1st from 5 to 9 p.m. The Cabriolet from the resort’s parking lot will open at 3 p.m. for the event.