I've Lived in a Bowl for Two Years and Never Noticed

I was driving back into Park City a few weeks ago, coming down from a road trip, when the valley opened up ahead of me from a few miles out. And there it was, plain as day: my little village, sitting inside a bowl.

Not a small bowl. Not one mountainside curling around a trailhead. A whole range of peaks, arcing wide around the base where the developers, whoever they were, decided to put a cluster of buildings and call it Canyons Village. I've walked and skied and driven through this place for two years. I've watched the light move across those same slopes a thousand times. And somehow it took a few miles of distance, on an ordinary afternoon, for the actual shape of the thing to reveal itself to me.

I said it out loud in the car: Wow. I can't believe I live there.

Google Earth image of Canyons Village Resort (my building circled in red)

I've spent fifteen years chasing this exact experience in other places — pointing a lens at Yellowstone, at Escalante, at the English Lake District, trying to catch a landscape at the moment it stops being scenery and starts being something you're actually inside of. It never occurred to me that my own front door might be sitting in the middle of one, hiding in plain sight because it was too close, too familiar, too much a part of the errand-running and grocery-getting of an ordinary week to register as anything more than "the mountains."

I looked, out of curiosity, for anything written about this particular shape — this wide, gentle amphitheater the village sits inside. I couldn't find a word of it. Which means, as far as I can tell, this is the first time anyone's put it into writing. Not because it's a secret. Just because most people driving through here are looking at their phones, or their gas gauge, or the road.

I wasn't, that day. And there it was.

This is what this blog is for.