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The Best Ski Resorts in Utah (with video)

Filed under: Luxury Travel & Hotels, Sports, Video

To find out if the three resorts in the Park City, Utah area really do represent "The Greatest Snow on Earth", we skied and apres-skied and learned first-hand how fabulous the town and it's amenities have become. Indeed, the area has come a long way from the area's poor, silver mining history.

During the recent Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah was teeming with glittery Hollywood types littering local restaurants and bars, meanwhile abandoning the perfectly powdered slopes. Over the ten-day stretch, those idyllic resort town slopes– located less than an hour's drive from the Salt Lake City airport, stand virtually empty. It's an insider secret that the week and a half is ideal for powder junkies hungry for crowd-free runs during high season.

(Good luck finding a hotel room though!) As it turns out Hollywood isn't so into that kind of snow.

Fortunately out west ski and snowboard season run long. A good year means soft, fluffy snow starts falling just after Thanksgiving until -- if you're really, really lucky -- as late as Cinco de Mayo. Utah doesn't claim "Greatest Snow on Earth" for nothing -- the trademarked white stuff maintains a unique blend of "consistency, abundance and quality," says Ski Utah's Director of Communications Jessica Kunzer, "Anyone who skis dreams of skiing out west. You might like skiing wherever you're from originally -- if it's Minnesota, or, out east in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, [but] the general wish is to experience our soft, ice-free slopes."

The fleeting effects of Sundance come and go, but the snow steadily falls and the apres ski scene never dies. Here are three stellar spots to kick back and relax between smooth runs and story-worthy wipe-outs.

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