Park City’s Best Food, Drink And Skiing During Sundance Film Festival

14.01.2024 - 12:31 / forbes.com

There’s nothing in skiing quite like the Sundance Film Festival, which takes over Utah’s Park City in a way even the Christmas and New Years holidays cannot, with lodging sold out, restaurants, bars and sidewalks jammed, and roads closed to traffic.

Whether you are attending the Festival or just skiing, eating and drinking outside your accommodations will be more complicated than at any other time you can visit this charming town. The good news is that Park City has more good options—and hidden gems—than most Western ski towns. It also has more skiing than any other U.S. ski town, and the slopes are famously empty during the Festival, as the vast majority of people filling hotels are here to work at or participate in the film industry’s big show, Locals consider it an awesome time to ski—especially with all the recent snow. That also makes on-mountain dining and drinking a better option than ever, considering how crowded town is.

Just about every ski town is built around a big ski resort, but Park City is home to not one, but two of the nation’s premier mountains, including the biggest one of all in the United States, Park City Mountain Resort (there is a lot of misinformation in this regards, and resorts that claim to be bigger but include non-lift served areas like sno-cat skiing in their total, and for actual resort skiing included in your lift ticket and served by lifts, PCMR is tops with 7,300-acres and 41 lifts, according to Ski Magazine).

On the other side of the rope that divides the resorts is Deer Valley, another giant with over 100 trails, but best known as the nation’s most luxurious, white glove ski resort (along with luxury rival Beaver Creek in Colorado), and one of just three remaining major resorts that does not allow snowboarding. In the near future Deer Valley will more than double in size and is projected to become the nation’s fourth largest, as it just acquired an under-construction mountain next door and will see a huge expansion to over 5,000-acres. There’s something for every ski traveler here, as Deer Valley is on the popular Ikon Pass and Park City Mountain Resort takes the industry leading Epic Pass.

“Now that Sundance is offering a hybrid experience for film viewing [via online programming], many people are electing to watch movies from home. This has increased the availability of lodging for families that want to ski during the 10 days of Sundance. It is an exciting time to be on the mountain, because the terrain is fairly wide open during prime January ski days,” said Dan Howard, vice president of communications for Visit Park City, the local tourism board (with a very helpful website).

The 2024 edition of the Sundance Film Festival will be held January 18-28 in Park