The Best Ski Resort For: On-piste sightseeing

Park City, Utah

When he worked as a guide at Les Arcs, Michel Buet used to lead study tours around the ski area's backwoods. Highly unsuitable for speed merchants, his "Spirit of the Fox" trips were rather like primary-school nature study outings, designed to educate skiers about the mountain environment. They were focused on flora and fauna; but the most fascinating part was Buet's exposition of the social history of the valley.

Travel on any chair-lift with any guide and you'll usually gain some insight into a ski area's real life, if only from the animal tracks. (Skiers drop enough food to make it worthwhile for scavengers to follow the line of the lifts, as a guide once told me.) But there are some ski areas so obviously marked by human history that you don't need a guide.

Take for example Faqra, near Beirut, which must be the only resort to have parts of a Phoenician temple still standing on its slopes. Or Jahorina in Bosnia, marked by more recent history: set above the former Serb stronghold of Pale, outside Sarajevo, its facilities suffered considerable collateral damage from Nato bombers trying to hit a telecommunications mast.

But the most remarkable resort for sightseeing on skis is Park City in Utah. In common with many North American ski destinations, its origins lie in mining; and it opened for skiing (in 1963) with a bizarre "lift" which carried skiers on a mine-train into the heart of the mountain, from where they were hoisted 520m up a shaft in a cage. But unlike other resorts, sleek-but-canny Park City hasn't cleared away the remains of its industrial past. Instead it has left eerie talisman – such as the slag-heap, conveyor and winding-tower alongside the Thaynes Canyon piste – just rotting away, to very evocative effect.

www.parkcitymountain.com