Part 2: The holy land
Gazing up at the sunbathed peaks of the Teton Range that final morning in Jackson Hole didn’t make it any easier to admit defeat and reconfigure our plans for the winter. In the sense that we couldn’t locate digs worthy of our bohemian lifestyle and budget, I suppose housing was the main issue.
On paper, as a couple of card-carrying California expatriates, we had high hopes that a winter spent skiing in Wyoming would provide a sort of rebirth from the ’60s West-Coast lifestyle from which we had so recently emerged.
Becoming acutely aware that we had better find shelter for the winter sooner than later, a sense of urgency prodded us back toward the Wasatch and our friends in Park City. So with the Hoback country and the Wind River Range ever-receding in our rear-view mirror, we looked for new beginnings.
As newcomers without adequate grubstake to acquire some of the more recently fabricated housing in town, however, the issue of adequate lodging once again raised its head.
For the most part the older houses that afforded heat and running water had already been spoken for — including miners’ shacks. Lucky for us, though, we could always keep up with the shifting sands of the rental market at that local networking hotspot, the Alamo Saloon.
Becoming acquainted with more and more locals provided us with more and more housing leads, not to mention more and more hangovers. Coming up with a place to set up bookshelves, deposit crates of vinyl and 8-track recordings, and wire-up a stereo had more than moderate morning-after consequences.
That was the case even for those of us who had been visiting town over the past several years and had a peer group firmly entrenched to help us gain entrée to the market. As it turned out, a friend of a friend of my brother’s, who had returned to California that winter, led us to a couple of his ski-bum friends then in the process of moving.
You could instantly see why they wanted a change of venue. Fifty bucks a month for a ski-in ski-out golf-in golf-out single-house accommodation was probably a bit much. Especially sitting, as it did, on the very edge of town with a movie-screen-sized bay window, a large fireplace, and little, if any, ambient light in the vicinity to dilute the quite heavily-populated night sky.
Built of cinder blocks and situated behind the old Miners Hospital near the base of what was then known as the Treasure Mountain Resort, it flaunted a moderate foyer that would soon, as a community service, become a crash pad for all variety of Dynamic, Dynastar, Head, K2, Rossignol, Kneissl, and even, if the truth be known, the occasional toboggan.
The latter, and a few of its brethren, most often came into play up on the Three Kings hillside where they had already cut runs but had yet to install a lift. Once the first snows came, all manner of toboggan races, usually fueled by hard cider from the back aisle up at Earl’s Market on Main Street, would enter the folklore.
The footprint of the site behind the hospital also featured a frame house and an abandoned garage that sat between the two dwellings. Corky and Jan Foster had uprooted from Aspen somewhat earlier and occupied the house, becoming our first neighbors in Park City.
Corky would go on to co-found the Mucker rugby team and raise a litter of Newfoundland dogs in the garage, one of whom, named Nikos after Kazantzakis, would become an integral part of our family.
When the Miners Hospital, following a bit of remodeling, opened for monthly rentals, all bets were off. Soon, a quorum of some of the hippest, coolest, craziest, looniest, and most creative misfits ever to strap on a pair of boards and point them downhill were performing improvisational theater all over town. In one fell swoop, the hood became far less quiet and far more interesting.
Many of us who had come only for the winter of 1970 but had somehow allowed the ensuing summer to set its hooks in us, now, forty years later, wink at each other when crossing paths. Often we’ll hoist one to friends now gone and recall the good old days when the town was rough at its edges and true to itself. To us, it was, indeed, the holy land!
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.