Utah Olympic Park, Home of the 2002 Winter Olympics

The Winter Olympics were held in Salt Lake City in 2002. A large part of these games actually took place in Park City. In fact, like most Olympics, entire facilities were built for the games. Utah Olympic Park in Park City is now a US Olympic and Paralympics training facility year round.

The site is impressive. I had been by it many, many times but never stopped. Today we decided to have a little adventure while visiting.

The 2002 Olympics hosted 78 countries and were held all over the Salt Lake area and the mountains of the Wasatch Range, which included Park City, Little Cottonwood Canyon and Big Cottonwood Canyon.

Did you know that the US won 34 medals in the 2002 Olympics? This was only 2nd to Germany.

They have done a nice job at this facility not only giving history about these Olympics, but about how winter sports in the Park City area have been such a huge part of the region since the early 1900’s.

There is a museum that is free sharing all of this history, as well as some video of the 2002 games.

As mentioned, this is a live training facility. Summer weather does not stop the training. Here, we saw ski jumpers using the jumps into a deep swimming pool to perfect their technique.

You can see these ski jumps from the highway. When we were here last winter they were practicing in the snow.

We were inspired with all the athleticism around us so we decided to join in. So we decided to…..zip line through the park!

First we took a lift to the top of one of the smaller hills. Look how beautiful the summer blue sky was, once again.

Then it was time to get ready to go. We have zip lined once before, in Belize. That was through the jungle, going from wooden platform to platform. This was much more well structured, and professionally assembled.

Once we got off of the lift we had a safety course and got our equipment on. This particular package was called a zip line tour. It was a total of 7 runs between platforms. At it’s height, you are zip lining 161 above the ground, descending back to the park from each platform. There is a guide at each platform, there to ensure safety for everyone.

Below is the view before starting off of the first platform.

This is the top of the first run. It was about 300 feet long.

Phone have to be tucked away so we don’t have many pictures during the runs. Suffice it to say; it was exhilarating!

Between 2 of the runs you had to walk on a hanging suspension bridge, just to add to the excitement.

In all, the tour of the 7 runs took a solid hour. Total time was about an hour and 45 minutes. Well worth the money for a fun summer afternoon.

Note: we were sore in unexpected places after zip lining. But we would still do it again!