Jan Wilking
Park City, Summit County, Utah
Marker Inscription
Jan Wilking: How Park City Trails Came To Be. ... Jan Wilking moved to Park City in 1969... [Jan] in 1992 took the lead in forming the Mountain Trails Foundation to build, maintain, and protect trails in Park City...
The Story
When Jan Wilking moved to Park City, Utah, in 1969, the old silver-mining town was reinventing itself around skiing and the outdoors. In 1992 he led the creation of the Mountain Trails Foundation to build and protect the network of paths that now threads the surrounding mountains. His work helped turn abandoned mining slopes into a celebrated recreational landscape.
Why it matters
Park City's transformation from a fading mining camp into a world-renowned resort town mirrors the broader reinvention of the American West around recreation and tourism.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Park City, Utah, spent its first life as a silver-mining town, one of the many Western camps that boomed on the metal pulled out of the surrounding mountains. But by the late 1960s, when this story begins, that era was fading, and towns like it faced a hard question: what to become once the mines no longer carried them.
The answer, for Park City, lay in the same mountains that had once been valued only for their ore. Steep slopes that had served the mines could serve skiers; hillsides scarred by industry could be reimagined as recreation. It was a reinvention playing out across much of the mountain West, as old resource towns turned toward the outdoors and the visitors it drew.
Into that town in transition, in 1969, came Jan Wilking. He arrived at the moment when Park City was still figuring out its second life, and he would spend decades helping to shape one of the pieces that made the new identity work: the trails.
People & events
The marker honors Jan Wilking and the question it poses as its title — how Park City's trails came to be. Wilking moved to town in 1969 and became a driving force behind the network of paths that now threads the mountains around it.
The pivotal act it records came in 1992, when Wilking took the lead in forming the Mountain Trails Foundation, an organization dedicated to building, maintaining, and protecting trails around Park City. That kind of work is rarely glamorous — it means organizing volunteers, securing access, planning routes, and committing to the endless upkeep that keeps a trail open year after year — but it is exactly the work that turns scattered paths into a genuine system.
What makes his story resonate is where those trails run. Many of them cross ground once given over to mining, so the same slopes that once served the extraction of silver were remade, through decades of patient effort, into a landscape for recreation. The foundation he helped create carries that work forward.
Its place in the American story
Park City's journey — from a fading silver camp to a celebrated resort town built around skiing and the outdoors — mirrors one of the defining transformations of the modern American West. Across the region, communities that once lived and died by mining or timber have reinvented themselves around recreation and tourism, trading extraction for experience.
A memorial to a trail-builder captures a truth easy to overlook in that transformation: it did not happen by accident. Reinvented mountain towns depend on people who did the unglamorous groundwork of building the amenities — the trails, the access, the maintained landscape — that visitors now take for granted.
Jan Wilking's story stands for the countless local organizers whose patient labor made the recreational West usable. The scenery was always there; the network of paths that lets people move through it had to be built, defended, and cared for by someone.
If you visit
Park City wears both of its lives openly — mining heritage layered under a modern outdoor-resort town — and the trails Wilking championed are the thread that connects them. The best way to honor this memorial is simply to get onto one of those paths and travel a little of the ground it celebrates.
As you walk or ride, watch for the marks of the town's mining past on the slopes around you. The realization that recreation trails now cross land once worked for silver is the whole point of the place, and it's easy to feel underfoot.
The marker makes a natural pause on a day already spent outdoors here. Stop, read the story of how the network came to be, and let it deepen the trip: the ease of the trail you're enjoying rests on decades of work by people who chose to build it and keep it open.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
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