Equateur Flowers

Snowbasin? You haven’t heard of it but you will by 2002. The four Olympic downhill events (men’s and women’s downhills, plus the downhill elements of the combined) and the two super giant slaloms are to be held here.
You may hear even more about the sprawling city of Ogden, which is hosting the curling events and is also effectively the host city for the races at Snowbasin, which is a short drive up into the Wasatch mountains from Ogden.
The resort is in the same ownership as Sun Valley, and big investment in hotels and other accommodation is expected over the next few years. It needs it, or the big investment already made in lifts will have been wasted.

The place is at present not a ‘destination’ resort it has no accommodation. But you could easily stay in Ogden, which has an up-and-coming ‘historic district’ as well as the usual car-oriented urban sprawl, and drive up to the slopes. It’s also possible to stay close to the mountain in (or close to) Huntsville a spacious backwater town beside a reservoir on the floor of a high basin, surrounded by mountains. Then you’d be able to spend your evenings in Utah’s oldest tavern (opened 1879), the Shooting Star a splendidly authentic relic of times past, thanks to the owners’ determination to change nothing. It is a simple, scruffy place, with booths, a bar, a juke box, pool table and not much else. On the walls are not only a stuffed moose and an elk but a stuffed St Bernard dog apparently a beast of record-breaking enormity. The place is equally famous for its offensively huge Starburgers, which come with sausage as well as multiple burger patties etc.

Snowbasin’s mountain (shown on page 500) is not one of those Olympic hills that make a good race course but a lousy basis for a holiday. There is a lot of terrain, it is pleasantly varied and it is served by eight lifts including a fast quad chair and two gondolas, all three installed in 1998.

The two gondolas serve mixed mountainsides, the left-hand Strawberry accessing mainly long open blue runs but also leading to a lightly wooded steeper slope at the extremity of the area and, with some climbing, to a range of seriously steep chutes. The area’s Middle Bowl is more complex, with lots of different slopes and gullies presenting different challenges. The John Paul fast quad chair, on the extreme right, serves great black slopes, on- and off-piste, with just one blue alternative way down. Above it, a small cable-car goes up to Allen’s Peak, serving a short black slope that was mogulled when we were there but will be glass-smooth when it serves as the start of the Olympic downhill race course. The course has been designed by Bernhard Russi who else? It drops 844 metres and is already claimed to be a modern classic. The parts of it that were open when we visited in 1999 were certainly impressive. Between the race course and the area boundary is a splendid area of off-piste wooded glades and gullies.

Snowbasin has a simple base lodge with a self-service restaurant and an outdoor terrace, as well as ski school and lift ticket sales. When we visited in 1999 it clearly had a long way to go before it is ready for the Olympics. There was furious construction going on at the lift bases, though not much sign yet of the large-scale real estate developments that are surely being planned.

At 400in, the average snowfall here is not in the Alta league and the resort had a very thin start to last season but it’s way ahead of Vail and the rest. And there are other attractions. Not the least is the amazing view, from the top of the Strawberry Express gondola, of the Great Salt Lake and surrounding plain. Another is the excursion to cutely named Powder Mountain, a few miles away across the other side of the Huntsville basin. This has (as you might hope) a reputation for powder. But it’s a simple resort and not very challenging hill, mainly of interest to locals.

‘In Europe, Deer Valley and Alta would by now be linked; as it is, even Deer Valley and adjacent Park City are separated by a fence.

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