We were staying at The Lift Lodge condo's for a week and ours wasn't going to be ready for a few hours so we went exlporing. We found Main St and something to eat. The weather was perfect, it was a Saturday and the streets were busy with shoppers....was fun to sit and watch.
We'd heard that the city museum was REALLY worth it, so we decided we had the time so we'd go...and what we'd heard was right..it was amazing. Park City was first put on the map for the Silver Mines.
The City went through lots of transition in the 1800's. It was discovered by Brigham Young and then became famous for the Silver Mines, and many years later the skiing..jpg)
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Much of the museum is about the Silver Mining.........
This made to scale model showed what happened at each level inside a mine...very interesting. The red arrows corresponded with the board above. You would hit a button and it would light up the area of the mine where that particular activity took place....very well done. It was a huge display, it was the height of 2 floors....
In the model you can see the aerial tramway on the left side ....going up and down the mountain
These were actual items from the mines...
This bike could be ridden on the tracks inside the mine
This was an actual RR car that was used to get the silver, and other debris out of the mine
They would drill through the walls....was very noisey from up above, u could actually demo this, it was loud and after hours of doing it, would be physically exhausting. They would also use dynamite
Denny checked out all the cool stuff ....there was so much to see.
While the mines were still open the skiing craze started. They hadn't figured out ski lifts yet so they utilized the mine tunnels and created a "lift" underground....they were noisy and the tunnels were messy, but it beat walking back up the mountain.
This shows folks getting off the underground Ski Lift!!
and determined it's value it is now the value!!
The museum is 3 levels...the street level then one level up and one level below. The lower level is the original territorial jail..very interesting.
Yep...they had to have a potty!!!
Cold, dark, damp was not nice. Depending on your crime you may have been chained to your cell wall.
There was a book in a room of the jail, and when you turned the pages it told you about some of the folks that had been in the jail....
Denny is in one of the "cages" the miners used to go up and down out of the mine. And here is the same shaft used to carry buckets of ore and silver...
Some really neat pictures of some of the men that really worked the mines....
There were some mock ups of the general store...and how it would have looked. There were a few original items still there.
The Stagecoach came and opened up new possibilities...
This is the famous bell tower
And the fire wagon.............
We had no idea the history of this city, it was truly fascinating and reminded us of Jerome, AZ...a city close to Sedona with much the same history, funny how these 2 cities were so similar.
After the fire the ski business really took off.......and now, all the winter sports are what Park City is really known for. There are many fun things to do in the summer, but winter is big business.
We walked around Main Street a bit, these bronze statues were in several places depicting the history of Park City.
We headed back to our condo and got checked in. We unpacked and just stayed in the rest of the evening. We'd bought a few groceries and we were good to go. We decided what to do on Sunday and just watched a little TV....
So our first day was fun filled and we had a whole week to go.......
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