Greetings from Deer Valley, Utah.
This picture of Becky and me was taken from the chairlift at Deer Valley. We were there in early March and I think we were smiling because it was the first time we saw the sun. It was a snowy trip to say the least, where it felt like you were skiing inside a snow globe.
Most of our trip was spent skiing Park City and the Canyons. We stayed in the Silver Star area, with a chairlift and café by the same name that made it feel like your own resort within a gigantic resort.
Getting to Park City is a piece of cake. We took a late afternoon flight out of Boston, landed in Salt Lake City around nine at night, and were at Park City around 10:15. A common practice is to take an early flight and be on the slopes that same afternoon.
The skiing is what you’d expect—awesome—with a ton of terrain. As East Coast skiers, our muscle memory prepared us for icy spots that simply did not exist.
If you want a retirement location with lots to do in the winter and summer and a booming economy, consider Salt Lake City. If you want to work, there’s a job for you. And if you want to ski and be near a cool ski town, it’s hard to beat Park City, Utah.
With easy access to Park City, it’s no wonder recent college graduates are flocking to Salt Lake City and other nearby towns. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Daunted by the high costs of established tech hubs, more tech companies are flocking to a belt of Rocky Mountain cities, from Provo, Utah, in the south, to Boise, Idaho, in the north. In that stretch, Salt Lake City, where adults under 35 make up a quarter of the population, may offer the best of all worlds for tech-savvy grads.
With big employers such as Adobe Systems, Overstock.com and Symantec, the area already has a high share of tech jobs per capita, and local tech-job postings on the jobsite Indeed.com climbed 12% last year.
Yet the Utah capital is relatively affordable—for now. A recent Cushman & Wakefield report found residents spend about 32% of their income on housing, compared with 40% in Denver and 78% in San Francisco. At least 10 ski resorts are within an hour’s drive, including Park City and Robert Redford’s Sundance, and the city sports a thriving microbrew scene.
Read more here.
