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Park City on 'dream town' list
By Lee Benson
Deseret News columnist
BEAT THE RUSH: The Olympics are over and there goes the neighborhood. All those people who said all our secrets would be revealed in the glare of 4 billion people tuning in for 17 days straight, hey, maybe they were right.
This month's issue of Men's Journal magazine could be just the tip of increased Utah awareness, enlightenment and invasion. In the cover story, "The 50 Best Places to Live," a rundown of "the healthiest, safest, most fun towns in America," Park City, host to the recent Olympics, not to mention Dave Chapelle, Ross the Intern, Tom Brokaw, Katie, Matt and Al and cameos by Sheryl Crow, is ranked 15th.
"Olympic dream town full of well-scrubbed nonsmokers," says the magazine.
That noise in the background is Park City Realtors working their calculators.
Not bad for a town that 40 years ago was listed in a book called "Ghost Towns of the West."
That was when mining was done and Stein Eriksen was still living in Colorado.
Park City is one of two Utah towns — only places with populations less than 50,000 were eligible — on the magazine's list. St. George ("hot summers; cool winters; fun-loving teetotalers") came in at 28.
Oddly, Moab, a real Men's Journal kind of place, did not crack the top 50.
Twenty-six states are represented, but the West dominates with 28 towns, many of them within an easy drive from Salt Lake. In our neighboring states, there are four on the list in Colorado (No. 2 Telluride, No. 4 Crested Butte, No. 14 Ouray and No. 36 Steamboat Springs), one in Nevada (No. 33 Incline Village), two in Wyoming (No. 6 Jackson and No. 42 Cody), three in Arizona (No. 12 Sedona, No. 24 Lake Havasu City and No. 46 Wickenburg) and two in Idaho, No. 16 Ketchum and little old Driggs (pop. 941), which came in as the No. 1 best place to live in America.
And Driggs didn't even have an Olympics.
The magazine gushes on about Driggs being a perfect man's town. Framed by the ice-picked Tetons in the distance, Driggs is 12 miles from the largely undiscovered but still spectacular Grand Targhee Ski Area, the Teton River filled with rainbows, cuts and brookies is next door, there's The Spud Drive-in Theater, Mike's Diner (buffalo meatloaf), mountain biking to your heart's content when the snow melts, and, finally, "it ain't Aspen."
The magazine notes that the stoplight that's scheduled to go in this spring will be the first in the town's history.
It does not note that it probably won't be the last.
That's the way it is with exposure. One day you're a perfect place to live; the next day people want to live there.
A few days after that, you're off the list.
Still, a compliment is a compliment, and no one wants to turn one away. Least of all Park City, a place that knows there's a fine line between boom and bust.
"We've never had a shot in the arm like the Olympics," says Myles Rademan, the city's public relations director. "Of course we'll try to take advantage of it all we can. More and more people are discovering what we know, that it's a good place to live. There definitely was a time when Park City was terra incognita,"
Terra incognita?
"You know, unknown territory. That's what they used to put on maps in the old medieval days, terra incognita, it was out there where the dragons were."
Or, to use a more current example, out there in Idaho where Driggs used to be.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.
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March 25, 2002
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