The last time the United States hosted the World Cup was 1994. That also happens to be the year Park City High School boys soccer won their first ever state championship. This year’s team didn’t match that success, but Park City did go on to win six other championships between then and now.

Back in 1994, prior to the start of the soccer season (spring semester for boys), the Park City squad had never won anything. But there had only been a boys team for a few years, so Park City parents and soccer fans had not endured much heartbreak to this point.

The Miners (then in 3A) started off 2-0 in region play, including a shootout victory over rivals Wasatch High (ranked third in the state at the time) after the overtime period ended in a 3-3 tie. Goalie Travis Hurteux stopped Wasatch’s fourth shooter to secure the victory and told The Park Record, “Oh my god, I was about to pee” when talking about nerves ahead of the shootout.

Unfortunately, the Miners lost three straight games after the 2-0 start, so they would need a strong finish just to make the playoffs. And a strong finish they got.

First, they took down the No. 1 ranked Lehi Pioneers at home on the smaller-than-average-sized soccer pitch at Dozier Field.

Then they won both ends of a home and away series against Morgan to tie Uintah High School for second place in the region. As Park City and Uintah had split their season series with an equal goal differential, second place and home advantage for the state playoff quarterfinals officially came down to a coin toss, which Park City won.

For the quarterfinals, Park City hosted Delta for what turned out to be a thriller for the players and spectators. Park City led 2-1 at halftime, and Delta scored two to Park City’s one in the second half to bring regulation to a close with a 3-3 tie. Delta had even led 3-2 and was looking to secure the victory before Park City scored with only a few minutes to play from a Mike Anderson header off a long throw-in.

Park City scored first in the overtime period and held their lead until Delta was given a penalty kick with four minutes remaining, which they converted to send the game to a shootout.

Not only did the game go to a shootout, but the shootout was extended into sudden death. Hurteux played hero once again, as he subbed in for regular goalie Chris Gray for the penalty kicks. His save in sudden death allowed Joe Pack to step up and knock in a winning kick for Park City to send the miners on to the semifinals.

Their semifinal match against Vernal again went to extra time after a 1-1 draw in regulation, but the Miners scored three in the extra period for a 4-1 win, bringing them to the finals, where they matched up once again with top-ranked Lehi.

In the championship match, with the Miners down three starters (due to injury and academic suspension), regular goalie Chris Gray this time played the hero. He made several diving saves, among other solid shot-stopping. Gray told The Park Record, “It meant winning state. I had to save them.”

The newspaper noted the Miners were outplayed most of the match, but they came away with the victory, thanks to Gray in goal, along with a spectacular bicycle kick in the final minutes of play by Enzo Mileti that found the back of the net. Mileti, who was named the tournament MVP, called it the greatest moment of his high school career.

Immediately after the victory, head coach Gary Blanton told The Park Record that it had not hit him yet that they had just won their first ever title. As The Park Recordrelated, it literally hit him moments later, “when the team smeared victory cake in his face and dumped the water jug over his head, á la the NFL.”

Before the summer runs out, be sure to check out the Park City Museum’s tour offerings, including a Main Street walking tour, a Park Avenue walking tour, and a Glenwood Cemetery tour. Sign up and purchase tickets here: https://parkcityhistory.org/events/.

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum research coordinator.

The post Way We Were: Putting in the extra time appeared first on Park Record.

As shown in the Park City Museum’s latest exhibit (up through March next year), Parkites are no stranger to protesting. We gather to fight for what we believe in, whether the issue is hyper-local, statewide or national.

Sometimes the protests are only in Park City. Other times, Parkites travel down to Salt Lake City to protest at the State Capitol.

Or on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Back in April 2003, Greg Schirf, the man behind the Wasatch Brewpub, staged a re-creation of the Boston Tea Party, only this time it was for beer.

Schirf had ruffled feathers around the state over the years for poking fun at the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints and Utahns with things like naming a beer Polygamy Porter: “Why Have Just One?” Or by calling beer “Utah’s other religion.”

Apparently, some legislators had had enough and had openly talked about finding a way to punish Wasatch and other alcohol makers.

State Sen. Michael Waddoups, a Republican from West Jordan, sponsored a bill that ultimately increased the wholesale tax on 31-gallon kegs of beer from $11 to $12.80, which meant an increase in taxes of $35,000 to $40,0000 per year for Utah’s brewers, most of which are small businesses.

Waddoups denied to media that the tax was in response to Schirf’s playful jabs toward Utah culture despite persistent rumors from the Capitol Building that it was at least a large factor in creating the bill. He noted the primary goal was to fund drunk-driving law enforcement.

On April 3, 2003, Schirf debuted his First Amendment Lager, four barrels of which he and his supporters promptly poured into the Great Salt Lake to protest the tax, saying “Taxation without representation is tyranny … I mean Utah.”

Schirf, dressed as Ben Franklin, told The Park Record, “The spirit of the protest was mostly fun, but there was an element of seriousness that the tax was levied in an unfair manner.”

Some people lauded the playful and peaceful protest, while others found it in poor taste. One editorial noted there were better uses for beer than pouring it into a lake. A cartoonist in The Park Record pictured SpongeBob and his Bikini Bottom pals having a pint of the new lager, courtesy of Schirf. Ultimately, it was a very Park City protest, despite happening 40 miles away from town.

“Park City Loves A Parade: Our Parades, Processions and Protests from Past to Present” runs in the museum’s Tozer Gallery until April 4, 2027. Learn all about the creative and interesting ways Parkites have celebrated our town, mourned our loved ones, and stood up for our beliefs.

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum’s research coordinator.

The post Way We Were: Give me liberty or give me … a cold one appeared first on Park Record.

For most people, today is simply April Fools Day. For Parkites who arrived in the 1970s and early 1980s, it’s Clown Day.

The Newspaper indirectly noted that the first affair was in 1974. By 1975, Clown Day was an official fundraiser for the Park City Ski Club and Park City Ski Team for their efforts to make ski racing accessible to junior competitors.

While the phenomenon only featured around 80 participants in 1976, Clown Day quickly outgrew its fundraising roots to become a Park City holiday.

Some of the main group to get Clown Day started included Greg Ash, Terry “Tutu” Jannott, Jim Carr, Tim “Razor” Sharp, Joe “Porky” Onn, Bob Blair and James “Steakhouse” Grinsell. In an obituary for Terry Jannott, Jay Meehan of The Park Record wrote “Tu-Tu, of course, insinuated the entire concept of ‘Clown Day’ into Park City’s consciousness.”

In addition to being a fundraiser, the event also started as a larger concept. The first few years featured a parade down Main Street and an official brunch. The event also changed dates each year, usually occurring in mid-April as a kind of closing event for the ski season. Not until 1981 did Clown Day move to April 1 on a permanent basis.

Due to the timing, Clown Day often overlapped with the Park City Town Race series, where locals compete in ski racing competition. Sometimes, locals had to choose between the silliness of Clown Day and the seriousness of the Town Race.

Herein belied one of the problems that would spell the end for Clown Day. After the 1985 April 1, when Clown Day and the races collided, the race director complained of low attendance for the usually popular series, citing too many locals off gallivanting as clowns.

Another problem the community faced was that school attendance dropped dramatically each April 1, as students would play hooky and head to the slopes for Clown Day. School administrators and some parents were not too happy with the absences.

Perhaps the largest problem for Clown Day was that after it outgrew its fundraiser status, it ultimately became one large party. Sometimes the clowns would become too rowdy, often after consuming a bit too much alcohol.

Then-Park City Ski Area had never officially endorsed Clown Day, but had also not prevented the dress-up day. Eventually, however, they began to field complaints from out-of-town guests who happened to be on the slopes when Clown Day locals took over the runs.

First, the resort decided to step in and half-participate in the day by throwing a parking lot party near the base of Three Kings lift. The idea was to keep people occupied at the party and away from the slopes. Other directives included stopping alcohol sales at 1 p.m. for on-mountain oases and disallowing employees from participating in Clown Day.

But after the 1985 conflicts, the resort decided it would perhaps be easier to just put a quash on the event altogether. So in December, they announced that all season pass-holders and coupon users would be banned from dressing up on April 1 (or any other day should the date be changed).

Many locals were, of course, not happy.

In an editorial, Rick Brough claimed that removing the local clowns (drunk or not) at the behest of tourists was more dangerous than letting the tourists ski freely, writing, “They are keeping the safest and best skiers off the slopes. At the same time, who are they trying to get on the slopes? A bunch of rich, accident-prone, out-of-state tourists just begging for a compound fracture. … [They] won’t be watching the clowns. They’ll be too busy body surfing over rocks or being impaled on aspens.”

While rowdy Clown Day participants certainly hold some of the responsibility for its cancellation, ultimately a fun local tradition was booted in favor of catering to tourist comfort. The unofficial holiday was virtually nonexistent for the rest of the century.

Luckily, some diehard Parkites refused to let the very Park City holiday die out and kept the tradition alive in subtle ways until, by the 2000s, they could be more out in the open with dressing up and having fun on the slopes each April 1.

It’s still not an official event, and the resort still doesn’t support it, but they have looked the other way over the last 25 years as a tamer version of Clown Day takes place each year.

Rick Brough ended his editorial with spirited Parkite wisdom: “Get the clowns off the streets and onto the ski slopes, where they belong!”

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum’s research coordinator.

The post Way We Were: No more clowning around appeared first on Park Record.

The Park City Museum has a new exhibit!

Two and a half years in the making, “Park City Loves a Parade” is an emotional journey through Park City’s history by exploring how Parkites have demonstrated our community’s various values and viewpoints with public outdoor gatherings of parades, processions and protests.

The exhibit will help guests discover how our community has come together to celebrate our highest highs, support each other during our lowest lows, and practice solidarity during trying times to stand up for what we believe in.

Before we began the process of creating a new exhibit from scratch back in the summer of 2023, we had a date of February 2026 in mind (2026 because of America 250 and February because it would be after Sundance Film Festival ended.

The first step was to find a topic to cover. Our exhibit team spent a couple of weeks coming up with ideas and then met each month from September to November 2023 to narrow it down to one.

Ideas that were fun but didn’t move forward included an exhibit on Wild West times and Prohibition in Park City; an exhibit on sports in Park City; an exhibit on Kendall Webb and his photographs; an exhibit that would compare 1876, 1926, 1976,and 2026 in Park City. Obviously, we chose “Park City Loves a Parade.”

And that idea was fleshed out from beginning to end, right? Right!?

Nope. As with any project of a large scale, things change over time. Some elements were added, some eliminated, some transformed. Originally, we thought we would have four sections for the exhibit: Celebrates, Supports, Mourns, and Protests. Ultimately, due to limited space, we eliminated the Supports section. But don’t fret — many of its elements were folded into the Celebrates and Mourns sections.

The scope of the exhibit was also narrowed to make it more manageable. We originally included all public gatherings for our initial list of topics within each section. Pretty quickly, we decided to only have outdoor public gatherings, which got rid of balls and dances, fundraisers, indoor funerals, etc. We decided we wanted to focus on the spectacle of larger gatherings like parades, processions, and protests — and what those events said about our community.

OK, now it would be easy — we could just include every parade and protest and funeral procession Park City has ever had. There couldn’t be that many. Wrong again! There are so many events and stories we wanted to tell within the framework we created, but could not due to the limited space for our Tozer Gallery.

We could have taken over the whole museum with this exhibit with how many things we could have included. Again, don’t worry — stay tuned for some Way We Were articles, social media posts, and programming over the course of this next year to catch many of those stories that we couldn’t fit into the physical exhibit.

Narrowing down the stories took about a year of research, figuring out which stories stood out, which had enough content to back them up, and which ones supported showcasing an item (or items) from our collection that have been in storage out of public view.

Then, we had to write the text for all the panels, descriptors and captions, plus a short film. Cutting down stories to fit on a panel and still be impactful is tough. Oh, and we had to design the exhibit within the dimensions of our Tozer Gallery, choose color schemes, make props, and come up with interactive elements to keep people engaged and provoke thoughtful reflection for what they would be reading and viewing. That’s what took up the rest of our time.

All in all, we spent countless hours researching, writing, editing, designing and building this new exhibit for you all to discover more about Park City’s past and present. “Park City Loves a Parade” will be open through March 2027 and is included with admission to the museum.

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum’s research coordinator.

The post Way We Were: Building an exhibit appeared first on Park Record.

As always, discussion of the Silver Mine Adventure garners much interest. After my last article on the attraction published a few weeks ago, I’ve heard from a couple of people who were around when it closed.

The day of publication, Jay Hamburger, our esteemed local reporter, reached out to me regarding part of the mystery of a lack of news coverage. Jay wrote a story about the Silver Mine Adventure closing — he believes it was a November 1999 issue of The Park Record — but he cannot find the story in the Park Record database and does not have a personal copy.

That led me to ask: If Jay knows he wrote about the closure, then why have I not been able to find it? So I dug into the 1999 Park Records we have at the museum — and it turns out we are missing every issue from April through November. (If anyone has any of those issues, we’d love to have them!) I do not know why we have this random gap in an otherwise very consistently collected catalogue.

What I do know is that I also misattributed some information in the article a few weeks ago. That information also turned out to be hearsay, as opposed to what happened. Here is the incorrect paragraph in full:

“Issue three was an alleged self-inflicted wound. With its incredible success and reputation, longtime local Rory Murphy (who helped launch and run the experience) related in an interview that the Silver Mine Adventure appeared on the radar of Six Flags Entertainment Corporation. Six Flags decided to invest in or buy the Silver Mine Adventure and, as with all of its other holdings, open the business up to the stock market. Apparently, and unfortunately, Six Flags did not advertise their new holding, so when the Silver Mine Adventure launched on Wall Street, no one knew what it was and the stock fairly quickly tanked, making the local Park City attraction a casualty of the worldwide stock exchange.”

Rory kindly pointed out the mistake and misattribution, and offered to give the full story, so I finally sat down with him for a full oral history interview rather than the informal one we had done a couple of years ago.

Rory was actually hired to be the project manager for the construction of the Silver Mine Adventure (and perform a few other responsibilities) for United Park City Mines (UPCM), who owned the experience and most of the land surrounding Park City. He moved here for that job in 1994.

Ultimately, the Silver Mine Adventure cost a pretty penny to develop, with two above-ground exhibit halls, one below-ground exhibit hall, maintenance on the mine itself, and hiring everyone to make it happen. After it opened, UPCM was never able to recoup what they put into it, let alone turn a profit.

The only full quarter that the Silver Mine Adventure turned a profit was the one in which Rory temporarily took over as general manager for the experience. It was a job that required constant management of the people running the museum and mine experience, so that everything ran efficiently and cost effectively. Unfortunately, the outside companies that were tasked with management for the attraction were more focused on administration than management, according to Rory.

UPCM President Hank Rothwell fired the first company, from Tennessee, rather abruptly, allowing Rory to take the reins for a few months and show that the Silver Mine Adventure could be both popular and profitable. As United Park City Mines was a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange at the time, the overall vision and direction was handed down from their board of directors. They decided to pivot to an attraction management company from Texas. After another two years went by with little return, the board decided to shut the whole thing down.

“I’m [in New York] and Hank and I are making one last pitch to keep it open. And the chairman of the board, a guy named Joe Lesser — I’ll never forget this — goes, ‘Enough! We’re closing it down. I don’t want to hear any more.’ It killed me. [I knew it could be done right] and that’s what killed me.”

And so the Silver Mine Adventure closed. Rory was tasked with letting everyone know they no longer had a job — approximately 80 people. “It was painful,” he told me. “It was a lousy, lousy day.”

After that, UPCM sold off the mine and water rights, plus the exhibit halls and headframe building for the Ontario No. 3 to the Jordanelle Special Service District, which still owns it all today.

Rory sat back and shook his head, considering the rise and fall: “It’s a damned shame … It was great while it lasted.”

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum’s research coordinator.

The post Way We Were: The unfortunate end of the Silver Mine Adventure appeared first on Park Record.

The following is an excerpt from an oral history with former Parkite ReNae Rezac in May 2021. Her words are in italics.

ReNae held several jobs throughout her time in Park City, but worked in the Planning Department for quite a while. She was there during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, which Park City co-hosted with Salt Lake City.

So, I guess I was working in the Planning Department when we had the Olympics. What a blast. That was so fun.

 She was one of the many volunteers getting people on the correct buses before and after events.

I had an interesting experience. For one of the events that were held at Deer Valley, there were only two of us that were up there doing the offloading of people to go up the event which wasn’t bad. When it got bad was after the event and everybody was in such an all-fired hurry to get off the mountain. There were only two of us trying to control these mobs of people. They actually got what I would consider a little out of control, pushing and shoving trying to get on the buses first. They just wanted to get down the mountain and go to the restaurant or doing whatever they had going on. It was a little stressful. I would say that the city was really good in changing the way they did things to accommodate that kind of mentality. The next time they had an event up there they had a lot more than two people to try to help people on the buses.

ReNae was mostly too busy to catch any of the events.

I didn’t go to a lot of events. I worked a lot at the Transit Center loading. That was a different situation than people offloading from an event. These were people that were heading to events. It was really fun. Everybody was excited. We had buses going to different venues. We would have dumb little contests between the people that were lined up to go to the PCMR or the ones going to Deer Valley. It was really fun.

I had to ask: What kind of contests?

Trying to see who could do the loudest cheer. Just to keep them occupied and engaged and not focused on when their bus will get here.

Overall, ReNae loved the atmosphere of the Olympics, even if town was never the same after that.

I guess the traffic must have been horrendous, but what I remember is all the positive things. It was just awesome. But it was a double-edged sword. We welcomed the world here. Then we weren’t a secret anymore and it really opened the door to more real estate development. We used to make jokes in the Planning Department that the billionaires were pushing out the millionaires.

Indeed, the Olympics kicked off a development boom in Park City that really has not stopped, and may not stop through the next time Park City hosts the Olympics in 2034.

You can share your Olympic memories with the Park City Museum by contacting Dalton Gackle at research@parkcityhistory.org or 435-429-1540.

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum research coordinator.

The post Way We Were: Working the Olympics appeared first on Park Record.

Sundance Film Festival is leaving Park City after over 40 years in Utah. No longer will the Egyptian Theater host a world premiere. Main Street won’t see a sponsor and vendor takeover come next year. Independent film will have a new home in Colorado.

While locals have not always loved the traffic and attention that comes with the festival, Park City is losing a piece of itself.

The festival started small — so unimaginably small compared to its current form, or the craziness of the 2000s version of the festival. It began as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in 1978, with a few screenings at Trolley Square down in Salt Lake City.

Robert Redford got involved on the board in 1979 and led the change to become the U.S. Film and Video Festival in 1981, which was the festival’s first year in Park City.

After it struggled financially for a few years, Redford saved the festival by having his Sundance Institute brainchild take control of the annual affair in 1984. They later renamed the event after the parent organization in 1991, becoming the Sundance Film Festival known around the world today.

In its time in Park City (with one more festival to go), the festival gave a start to over 20 feature films that were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (including a win for “CODA” recently), plus all of the other nominations and wins in other categories. More than 20 documentaries have also been honored at the Oscars, not to mention dozens of short films.

Some of the most notable films in history were given their first chance at Sundance, as were the directors of those films. Many filmmakers went through programs at the Sundance Institute before bringing a film to Park City.

A short list of some of the most notable films and documentaries that debuted at the festival includes “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”; “Saw”; “American Psycho”; “Super Troopers”; The Blair Witch Project; Reservoir Dogs; Little Miss Sunshine; Donnie “Darko”; “Clerks”; “500 Days of Summer”; “Napoleon Dynamite”; “Whiplash”; “Boyhood”; “CODA”; “Past Lives”; “Memento”; “Get Out”; “Y Tu Mamá También”; “Before Sunrise, Blood Simple”; “An Inconvenient Truth”; “20 Days in Mariupol”; “Searching for Sugar Man”; “Man on Wire”; “Summer of Soul”; “Paris is Burning”; “Grizzly Man.”

There are too many actors, directors and screenwriters to name who debuted or got their big break through Sundance.

Sundance brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to Park City over the years. Some of those people stayed and became Parkites. The festival brought with it a passion for film, which led to a year-round thirst for cinema, allowing for organizations like Park City Film and an annual film festival at the high school to form.

The festival brought a sense of culture to what was then a burgeoning ski town. It helped make Park City a home for the arts, for expression and for exploration. It also brought celebrity status, for better and for worse, making Park City a place to be seen and experienced by celebrities, influencers, and stans.

Ultimately, Sundance Film Festival outgrew Park City — literally — and perhaps figuratively as well. Only time will tell the impact that Sundance leaving will have on both Park City and the festival, just as time allowed for independent film to help shape a small mountain community, and for that community to create a unique space for the cinematic arts.

The Park City Museum will be closed through Thursday, Jan. 29, for the final Sundance Film Festival in Park City.

Dalton Gackle is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: The last ‘Dance appeared first on Park Record.

When United Park City Mines decided to pivot and open a ski resort in town, Parkites were just happy for some good news. After federal funding for the resort came through, a sense of optimism coated the town.

Bonanza Day in May 1963 celebrated the coming resort and ended with a groundbreaking ceremony at what would become the resort base behind the old location for Miners’ Hospital.

And the resort opened to much fanfare from locals and other Utahns alike that December.

But with the new resort eventually came a new crop of people, through the rest of the 1960s and through the 1970s. These newbies were something that old-time Parkites, mostly blue-collar miners, had not thought of as a consequence of transitioning to a ski resort economy.

Ski bums and hippies steadily moved into Park City, completely changing the town’s culture by the 1980s. It wasn’t an easy transition, and it came with a decent amount of tension between the old and new residents. But there was cordiality and some silliness, too.

In 2013, town historian Gary Kimball sat down with media man Larry Warren for an oral history about Gary’s own life in Park City. He recalled those times, when the hippies came in and he had a choice to embrace or fight their presence.

Larry: And then you start getting ski bum-type people and then what did people think about the new residents? Their new neighbors?

Gary: Most of them didn’t see much of their new neighbors. Why, I shouldn’t say that, that’s a blanket statement because some people did like them. You know, they were kind of fun. Hell, I had some hippie friends that I thought were, you know, kind of neat.
The one opened the Leather Star on Main Street. Justin Allusion and his partner, Jesus Christ, went into a City Council meeting and says, this is Jesus Christ and I’m Justin  Allusion, and we’d like to get a business permit for whatever business it was and I remember the marshal, one time when I went to pay a bill or something at the city he was just stormin’ up a storm screaming almost, saying “Can you believe that, can you believe that they want a license?” We said: “Believe what?” And he said: “Well, smell that.” And the form they filled out did reek of marijuana.

Larry: So the guy said his name was Justin Allusion? [Just an illusion]

Gary: And there was Charlie Brown and I don’t know who all.

Larry: I’ve heard the name Charlie Brown. What was he famous for?

Gary: I had a little store down here, a little corner grocery store: Grub Steak Grocery. Then one time … Bill Henrion, my partner, he brought in a whole bunch of mules or donkeys — jackasses, whatever, burros.

Larry: Burros? Live animals?

Gary: No. Little [knick knacks].

Larry:  OK

Gary: Then we hired Charlie Brown to label them and he could write “Souvenir of Park City” in little gold paint and beautiful. He could do them just about as fast as I could sign my signature.

Ultimately, Gary decided to work with this new crop of Parkites, who were experiencing his hometown in a whole new way. The transition was not an easy one, but the Park City of today was shaped in large part by this period in our history, where the hard-scrabble miners met the happy-go-lucky ski bums.

If you have an interest in telling your Park City memories to the Park City Museum through an oral history interview, please contact Dalton Gackle at research@parkcityhistory.org or 435-429-1540.

Dalton Gackle is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: The hippy invasion appeared first on Park Record.

This year was an eventful one for the Park City Museum, as always! As part of our usual routine, we accessioned new items for our collections, which helps us meet our mission of preserving Park City’s history. Sign up for a membership to receive our newsletter, where you can learn about what’s in our collections!

To meet our mission of promoting Park City’s history, we posted plenty of amazing images on social media, told some incredible stories in these “Way We Were” articles, and brought in tens of thousands of visitors to experience the museum.

We featured several traveling exhibits throughout the year, including “Graveyard of Buoyant Hopes: Ghost Towns & Relics of the American West,” “Two Minutes to Midnight and the Architecture of Armageddon,” and “The Perfect Shot: Walter Iooss Jr. and the Art of Sports Photography.”

These exhibits help contextualize Park City within Utah, the American West, and the United States in life, politics and culture.

Of course, we held our annual Glenwood Cemetery event, where the theme was “Death and Disaster: Terrible Ways to Die!” It was a beautiful day to bring the stories of those buried in the Glenwood to life. Summer tours of the Glenwood proved to be a popular program for the year as well.

In addition to the public Glenwood and Main Street walking tours, our members continued to fill up the spots on our historic hikes to our former mine sites. These unique and fascinating hikes are only available to our members and are worth membership by themselves.

We also continued our lecture series, and 2025 turned out to be our most attended year yet. We covered a wide variety of topics in Park City’s past, present and future. To see what we have on the docket, head to our website.

Our next lecture, on Jan. 7 from 5 to 6 p.m., will be “Who Was Lady Morgan? The Life and Times of Philip Morgan,” given by local author Michael O’Malley at our Education and Collections Center at 2079 Sidewinder Drive.

In June, we highlighted Daly Avenue and Upper Main Street for our biennial Historic Homes Tour. Parkites and early summer guests were treated to nine beautiful historic homes, and one historic business. As usual, our annual historic preservation ribbons went out to celebrate our historic architecture, though we were thrown a wrench when Main Street had to close for a gas leak on the day of distribution.

Our Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History worked diligently to raise funds and coordinate work with our partners (a special thanks to Clark Martinez and his crew and the Utah DOGM) to finish the major preservation work on the Silver King headframe building.

Work in 2026 will shift to completing major improvements at the Thaynes Mine headframe building, where the Skier Subway experience famously let out.

All this to say, we had a great year! And it would not be possible without our hard-working staff, our loyal volunteers, and our devoted membership. Thank you to everyone for supporting the museum in 2025. We know 2026 will be even better because of you.

Get ready for our next exhibit, created by our team in house, which will arrive to our Tozer Gallery in March 2026, just in time for America’s 250^th celebration. Titled “Park City Loves a Parade! Our Parades, Processions and Protests from Past to Present,” the exhibit will connect Park City’s sense of community to our public displays in times of jubilance, sorrow and fervor.

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum’s research coordinator.

The post Way We Were: All in one year! Park City Museum brings history alive, again appeared first on Park Record.

Plenty of towns around the world have Christmas traditions, ranging from large festivals to Christmas markets to Christmas tree lighting ceremonies. Our modern tradition in Park City includes Santa on the ski lift and a torchlight parade, among other festivities. 

But years ago, coming out of the Great Depression, Park City was looking for something to bring back a communal spirit during the holiday season.

The Park Record reported in 1941 that a new tree lighting was “the firemen’s effort in establishing a better Christmas spirit in our community.” They also noted that the Parent-Teacher Association was hoping to make the tree lighting an annual tradition.

Santa Claus was tasked with greeting Parkites at the ceremony and signaling to light the tree, which would bring a beacon of light to the center of Main Street.

Indeed, the lighting turned into an annual affair, wherein a large evergreen tree was hauled in, up-righted, decorated, and lighted in the empty lot (at the time) just south of the post office (uphill). The tree lighting continued well into the 1950s, before falling away as Park City’s population declined, and with it the Christmas spirit once again.

Eventually, the Kimball Art Center, which used to sit at the northwest corner of Main Street and Heber Avenue, decided to bring the tradition back as Park City bounced back as a ski resort town.

Deer Valley donated a tree, and a Main Street lighting ceremony took place once more in 1981, 40 years after the first one had taken place. Interestingly, those involved thought their tree-lighting was Park City’s first ever, and were proud of their novel idea.

This second run of lighting a tree on Main Street (and sometimes in other prominent locations around town — like the Park City Library/Miner’s Hospital) lasted through the mid-2000s, before shifting to a permanent location in Miners Park in the 2010s. This change was part of the Electric Light Parade festivities that marked the winter season in Park City for about a decade. Eventually, some of the hotels, like Stein Eriksen Lodge and the Montage at Deer Valley, began hosting their own tree lightings as well.

The Canyons side of Park City Mountain began its tree lighting ceremony in 2016, which continues to today, while Main Street has shifted focus to the snowglobe displays.

Merry Christmas from the Park City Museum!

Dalton Gackle is the Park City Museum research coordinator.

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