PARK CITY, Utah -- I was standing with other curious visitors trying to picture riding a mine elevator up 1,750 feet to ski. That was after having been ferried three miles into the mountain via an open mine car.
Early skiers weren't coddled -- and I'm thinking few people who did Park City's Thaynes Lift in the 1950s opted to do it a second time.
This and the rest of Park City's early history are what make this place absolutely fascinating. So many modern ski areas have been built to order from the ground up, packed with ersatz mountain village architecture but not much original character.
Park City isn't like that. It's a real mountain town in Utah that morphed from silver mining to skiing bit by bit -- a fact not lost on anyone who spends a few hours with Park City Food Tours. They are far more than just a stroll among the town's restaurants.
The idea, said Park City longtimer Shirin Spangenberg, was to combine food with history.
True, the food of Park City rates a visit by itself. Its restaurants keep getting voted best this and best that. But the history adds so much more. And, again, the Park City Food Tours stroll is also more than just a food sampling.
It's a chance to learn about the city while tasting unique dishes at restaurants that run the gamut from casual to gourmet. Plus, there's always at least one extra -- maybe a hand treatment at a day spa or a specialty olive oil tasting or perhaps popping into an art gallery.
Best of all, the tours go downhill, which is no small thing on a street that has a 215-foot vertical drop (that's like 20 stories) in just a few blocks.
We started at Treasure Mountain Inn with its old photos of the early mining days.
"In 1869, the First Transcontinental Railroad was joined just two hours from here," Spangenberg said. "Meanwhile, gold was being found everywhere so folks looked here as well."
Not much gold showed up but the consolation prize was silver -- some of the richest strikes in U.S. history. There are grainy black-and-white pictures along a hallway at the inn showing miners and the town in its early days before a massive 1898 fire, as well as photos of early skiing.
We learned, among other things, that at the height of Prohibition in this heavily Mormon state, there were 26 bars serving booze.
So it was fitting that our first stop was Wasatch Brew Pub.
In 1986, Greg Schirf had an idea -- open a brew pub for thirsty skiers. For this, he needed legislation, not easy to come by in Utah, where the question was "a brew ... what?"
Schirf found a friendly legislator, who slid the legislation into a bill so overloaded with other stuff that no one apparently noticed.
Over the years, Schirf has approached all this with tongue firmly in cheek.
There was the move by the state to slap a 4 percent tax on beer. So Schirf rounded up some guys, dressed them in Colonial garb and emptied kegs of beer into Great Salt Lake. It made the newspapers and, yes, a compromise was struck.
And of course, there's Schirf's Polygamy Porter, whose tag line is, "Why have only one?"
At Wasatch, our food tasting was giant, butter-tender shrimp coated in coconut batter with a mango/tabasco dipping sauce. It was accompanied by a jalapeno cream ale that screamed Mexican chilies but without the burn.
I had skied all day. I was famished. Yes, it was mouthwatering. I nearly ate the tails.
Down the street, Spangenberg pointed out Red Banjo pizza, which, in an earlier life, was a bar with separate doors for men and women. The two doors are still there.
From here, we went to the French flavor of 412 Bistro where the tasting of the day was a "wild forest mushroom saute" on toast with a goat cheese brandy cream and balsamic reduction.
"Forest mushrooms"?
They turned out to be Japanese maitakes -- foraged from Washington state -- and something called hog's hedge. Who knew there were that many tasty, edible fungi to be had? The dish was earthy, creamy, spirited but still mild.
Then it was off to the Park City Museum where we roamed a room with early ski relics, saw a giant side-cut of what the mines looked like in their heyday and learned about Thaynes Lift, that left-over mining train and elevator used for decades to take skiers up the mountain. With or without the food tour, that museum is worth a visit.
Next up: Talisker on Main, voted best restaurant in Park City by Salt Lake magazine three years running.
Chef Briar Handley came out to chat about his braised pork belly that our group, eventually, voted best taste of the tour. With all that was going on -- pork and pickled apples and celery and celery root puree and lobster roe in white wine -- we were somehow able to taste each individual ingredient even as they blended into their own earthy tapestry.
Behind us we could see the restaurant's chefs preparing that night's food, which added to the special feel of the place.
And, then, it was on to our final tasting at Wahso, an Asian grill built to replicate the feel of Shanghai, circa 1930.
The place just drips antiques. There's a 1,000-pound, 600-year-old Ming Dynasty cat, Mongolian statues with horsehair mustaches, teak columns and an intricately carved wood ceiling.
The offset to this opulence was a simple pear and endive salad sprinkled with currants, candied walnuts and topped with a citrus soy dressing -- a perfect way to end the food portion of the tour.
We were neither full nor hungry. It was just enough.
But Spangenberg had one more surprise for us: Mountain Body Spa for a "hand wash."
The treatment had four parts; even the guys gamely participated.
First, we were lathered with moisturizer, then with a grapefruit salt scrub followed by honey butter, a rinse under the faucet and finally, creamy lotion which came scented (thank you no, not on top of grapefruit and honey) and unscented.
We scrubbed and rubbed and rinsed. And my hands were smooth for the first time that week.
Four hours had passed. Good food had been tasted. Nice beer and wine had been sipped. We were relaxed and blissfully hydrated.
For more information on visiting Park City, Utah, check out visitparkcity.com. Call the Visitors Information Center at 528 Main St. in historic Park City at (435) 649-7457. Park City Food Tours can be reached at parkcityfoodtours.com or info@parkcityfoodtours.com or (435) 640-1271.
Travel on 02/15/2015