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Giant saw-toothed peaks on the eastern edge of Utah's urban centers, these forested slopes provide a popular haven. The Wasatch Mountain Range is nature's playground year-round, but in winter a fabulous low-density, low-moisture snowfall – 300in to 500in yearly – blankets the terrain. Perfect snow and thousands of acres of high-altitude slopes helped earn Utah the honor of hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics. Skiing in the Wasatch range is some of the best in North America.
Resort towns cluster near the peaks; Park City, on the eastern slopes, is the most well known and quasi-cosmopolitan. Salt Lake City resorts, on the western side, are easiest for townies to reach. Ogden is the sleeper hit and Sundance is known as much for its film festival as its ski trails. Most areas lie within an hour of the international airport: leave New York or Los Angeles in the morning to be skiing by noon.
These are our favorite local haunts, touristy spots, and hidden gems throughout Wasatch Mountains.
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Visit the site of the 2002 Olympic ski jumping, bobsledding, skeleton, Nordic combined and luge events, which continues to host national competitions. There are 10m, 20m, 40m, 64m, 90m and 120m Nordic ski-jumping hills as well as a bobsled-luge run. The US Ski Team practices here year-round – in summer, the freestyle jumpers land in a bubble-filled jetted pool, and the Nordic jumpers on a hillside covered in plastic. Call for a schedule; it's free to observe.
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Knowledgable guides offer nightly star-gazing tours allowing you to scan Huntsville's dark skies with two high-quality instruments, a research-grade 8in telescope and a 16in mounted reflecting telescope designed with hyperbolic shaped mirrors similar in concept to those used in the Hubble Space Telescope. The owner and his son assembled the dome themselves. Reserve ahead.
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Motorcycle enthusiasts won't want to miss this museum with more than 200 vintage bikes on display, including the exceedingly rare 1907 Harley-Davidson Strap Tank (one of only three such motorcycles in existence). Also worth visiting is the adjacent Strap Tank Brewery, which makes its own craft beer and surprisingly good pub grub. Springville is 12 miles south of Provo.
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A well-staged interactive museum touches on the highlights of the town's history as a mining boomtown, hippie hangout and premier ski resort. There are fascinating exhibits on the world's first underground ski lift, a real dungeon in the basement and a 3-D map of mining tunnels under the mountain.
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Interactive exhibits tell the history of skiing in the West. There's also a virtual-reality ski theater and 2002 Olympic Winter Games Museum. It's at Utah Olympic Park.
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The what’s-this-doing-here Museum of Art at Brigham Young University is one of the biggest in the Southwest, with a concentration on American art.
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Three beautiful caves in Timpanogos Cave National Monument are accessible on ranger-led tours.
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British street-artist Banksy left behind several cool works of art off Main St when his acclaimed documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop premiered in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. The most popular stencil, on the Java Cow building, depicts a cameraman filming an uprooted flower. You'll find another of his works, Praying Boy, at 537 Main St. The stencils were later vandalized and had to be restored and put under protective glass.
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Prepare for your children to squeal as a couple of animatronic dinosaurs roar to life inside the museum. Outside, it's like a giant playground where you can run around, under and over life-size plaster-of-Paris dinosaurs.