The line that outlived the mines it was built to save

Two railroads raced up one canyon to feed the mines

In 1880, the Utah Eastern Railroad built a narrow-gauge line between Coalville and Park City. It carried coal, not people. That coal fed the steam pumps underground in Park City's silver mines. The pumps pulled water out of shafts faster than it could flood them back in. Without the coal, the pumps stopped. Without the pumps, the mines drowned.

Union Pacific saw the same opportunity and built its own line alongside it, the broad-gauge Echo-Park City Railway. Two competing railroads ran side by side up the same canyon. Both were built to serve the same industry underground. The Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail State Park follows that corridor today. It starts near this ground and runs 28 miles north to Echo Reservoir. The narrow-gauge line did not last. It was abandoned within a few years, its work done or undone by the mines it served.

Union Pacific abandoned the line and hikers took it over

Union Pacific kept running trains up this corridor for another hundred years after the narrow-gauge line gave out. Ore came down, supplies went up, until 1989, when Union Pacific abandoned the line for good. The mines it had served for a century were closing or closed. Steel rails that had hauled coal to keep silver shafts pumped dry sat unused.

Union Pacific handed the corridor to Utah's Division of Parks and Recreation. A company called A&K Railroad Materials pulled up the old track. In 1992, the graded railbed reopened as the Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail State Park. It was Utah's first trail built for walking, biking, and horses rather than freight. The route still climbs the same canyon the coal trains once used to keep the mines beneath Park City from filling with water.

Fire destroyed three-quarters of Park City in seven hours

Fire broke out on Main Street on a June morning in 1898. Canyon winds whipped it along. It burned for seven hours. It took out nearly three-quarters of the town, roughly 200 buildings. Damage ran past a million dollars. It was called the worst fire Utah had ever seen. Only walls stood where storefronts had been. Park City rebuilt anyway, over the same silver seams the fire could not reach, and the mines kept running underneath the wreckage.

A mining town's high school became a festival cinema

Park City High School went up in 1928. It was three levels of brick in a Collegiate Gothic style. It cost $200,000. It stood at 1255 Park Avenue. It served the mining town's children for more than fifty years. By 1981 the district had outgrown it. A new campus opened on Kearns Boulevard. The old building sat empty instead of coming down. It was restored and reopened as the Park City High School. The Jim Santy auditorium now screens films there. It shows films during the Sundance Film Festival every winter.

Miners built a hillside cemetery and later filled it

Silver miners founded a burial ground on the hillside in 1885, calling it Glenwood Cemetery (Park City, Utah). It sits about two-thirds of a mile from where you stand. The men who dug the shafts and ran the pumps that kept them dry ended up in the same ground they had worked. It has taken more than 950 burials since, and it is still active today, five acres on a slope above the town they built.