MINE RIDE DELVES DEEP UNDER SKI RESORT.

Byline: Christopher Smith Salt Lake Tribune

If you planted a World Trade Center tower upside down in Ontario Canyon and rode the elevator to the top, you wouldn't be deep enough. Drop down another 40 stories, and finally you are ready to begin a trip into Park City's past.

It is here, 1,500 feet below the groomed ski runs disguising Park City's mining roots, that Utah's newest tourist attraction starts. The $2.5 million "Park City Silver Mine Adventure" theme park opened at United Park City Mine's historic Ontario Canyon site in December.

"We've tried to find a balance of history and entertainment so it's not the Knott's Berry Farm mine tour and it's not the Park City museum," says Roy Turley, general manager for Leisure and Recreation Concepts.

This project, on Old Mine Road just south of town, helps reclaim the ski resort's checkered heritage - a time when candlesticks and oil lamps lit the shafts, fortunes were found and lost overnight, soiled doves beckoned from boarding houses and a temperance worker declared that Park City was situated "only 40 rods from hell."

The Ontario mine, with ore running 400 ounces of silver to the ton when Rector Steen made the claim in 1872, is now owned by United Park City Mines Inc. It has been on stand-by status since 1982, when 350 miners where laid off because of falling silver prices.

"In its history, the Ontario has yielded about $400 million in silver, and it's believed there's about $3 billion worth of ore still underground," said Becky Erickson, marketing director for the theme park. "But it would cost $5 billion to get that $3 billion out, so it's just not feasible anymore."

More than $1 million annually is spent to maintain the Ontario, and United Park City Mines hopes the theme park's projected 179,000 visitors each year will help offset the mine's maintenance costs.

Admission to the exhibit hall plus the 90-minute mine tour is $12.95 for adults and $9.95 for children. Tour guides take up to 32 visitors below every 20 minutes, and the attraction operates daily.

Exhibits include artifacts exhumed from the depths of the area's mines - there are more than 1,200 miles of ant-farm-like tunnels beneath Park City - and life-size figures of prospectors and famous locals, including Shelly Christianson, the first woman to work in the mines.

Museum presentations include a former miner's shack converted into a theater, where films of horses being lowered into mines are shown; a company store with displays of Park City memorabilia; a series of tunnels salted with "gemstones" for children to explore; an exacting diorama of Ontario Canyon as it appeared in the late 1800s, and a lifelike robotic, mustachioed miner who discusses glory hole days with visitors.

But not all the history is animated or behind glass - much of it is embodied in several hard-rock veterans who have come out of retirement to lead tours for the new venture. Craggy characters like Van Walker, who sniffs that the new three-car underground train that hauls tourists instead of ore is "like a cruise ship" compared to his days here, from 1946 to 1962.

"When I first went to work, we rode on a wood board about this wide and you straddled it," Walker says while loading up a group of visitors wearing mandatory hard-hats and rain slickers.

A tour of a silver mine abyss is not for the claustrophobic. Tourists above ground get to stand in a stationary hoist car for a preview of the 4-minute ride down No. 3 shaft to a mine-car ride along a 3,200-foot horizontal tunnel.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo Visitors in yellow slickers get their first look at the Ontario Mine near Park City, Utah. Salt Lake Tribune