The Wasatch Front is a narrow urban corridor sandwiched between Utah’s Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Range. The region is home to Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Provo, as well as Utah’s major ski areas. The history of these cities and ski areas unfolded in tandem, starting with the rise of recreational skiing during the 1910s and culminating with the 2002 Winter Olympics. Skiers partnered with U.S. Forest Service officials, municipal planners, and environmentalists to forge Utah’s major cities and Wasatch forests into a singular urban space. Their collaboration sheds light on the blurred dichotomies that defined the modern American West: public and private, city and forest, region and nation.
Covering more than a century of contested terrain, Mette C. Flynt’s Ski City analyzes the Wasatch Front’s transformation through the development of ski communities, environmental management, marketing, urban planning, and wilderness policy. The drive for more ski terrain pushed urbanites to recognize the ecological ties between their communities and mountain watersheds and implement management plans to protect Utah’s limited water sources. Meanwhile, urbanites’ desire to expand ski development led them to envision cities within a larger environmental context, redrawing political boundaries to match ecological ones.
Skiing became the foundation of a new tourism industry, and by refashioning their state as a cosmopolitan, snowy place, Utahns hoped to counter popular images of their home as a rural, backward desert. Their efforts contributed to a broader effort to situate members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more firmly within mainstream American culture. Ski City is the story of how a sport transformed a forest, how a forest transformed a city, how a city transformed a region, and how a region transformed a state.