Cheap Park City Winter Break Itinerary for Local Families

Christmas break in Park City is a strange beast for locals. The town fills up with people who have specifically chosen to spend a lot of money to be here, and the price of literally everything — coffee, parking, a kids' lesson, a hot chocolate — adjusts accordingly. Meanwhile we still live here, the kids still need to be entertained for ten straight days, and we are operating on dual mountain-town salaries. Tyler does mountain ops at the resort, I do sales for a supplements company that is generous about flexibility but not about cost-of-living. We figured out the cheap version of this break years ago.

Our family rule on winter break is roughly 80/20 — 80% free or near-free activity, 20% paid. The paid 20% is intentional and we get good at picking which days deserve it. The free 80% is what fills the rest, and Park City has more free winter activity than visitors realize. Below is a full ten-day itinerary, day by day, the way we actually run it. Adjust as you like.

The 80/20 Itinerary

Day 1 (Saturday) — Ski local, ski cheap

Tyler is on the mountain for work; Liam, Ava, and Beck and I do a half day at PCMR using Tyler's family pass. Home for lunch. Afternoon is sledding at Run-A-Muck off Three Kings — totally free, decent pitch, the kids destroy themselves on it. Bring a thermos.

Day 2 — Snowshoe at Mountain Trails

The Mountain Trails Foundation runs free family snowshoe nights a few times a season — the kids' ski school instructors guide them. Check their calendar. If your night doesn't line up, just rent snowshoes from White Pine Touring once a season and you can use them on every groomed Nordic trail in town for free. We do Round Valley, which has a flat green loop Beck can do.

Day 3 — Olympic Park free walk-around

The Utah Olympic Park in Kimball Junction lets you walk the grounds for free. Look up at the ski jumps, watch athletes on the bobsled track if they're training, hit the museum (also free). Liam is obsessed with anything Olympic. We pack lunch in the car. This is a 90-minute kid timer at our house.

Day 4 — Paid day: Tubing at Gorgoza

Here's a piece of our 20%. Gorgoza Park tubing at the base of the resort is, in my honest opinion, worth the money for kids 5-9. They love it, it tires them out, and you don't need any gear. Buy the cheapest time slot, go early, leave when the lines get long. We do this once per break.

Day 5 — Library + Java Cow

The Park City Library does winter break programming — Lego club, story time, science experiments. All free. Walk over to Java Cow on Main for hot chocolate after, which is the one Main Street splurge I'll defend. Their kid-size hot cocoa is small enough not to break us and they do not water it down.

Day 6 — Ice skate at the PC rink

The Park City Ice Arena public skate is one of the cheapest paid activities in town — under $10 per person including skate rental at writing. Two hours, three exhausted kids, done. Liam is starting to be able to skate backward. Beck holds the wall.

Day 7 — Sledding at Run-A-Muck round two

Free, again. We bring the neighbors this time. The kids invent a tournament. Tyler builds a jump. Hot chocolate from a thermos. This is the best kind of break day.

Day 8 — Heber day

We drive over to my parents' in Heber Valley for a midday meal. The kids run around their backyard, my mom feeds us, we leave with leftovers. Free. Sometimes we hit the Heber Valley Railroad in the off chance the polar express tickets aren't sold out — but those are pricey, fair warning, we usually skip.

Day 9 — Cross-country at White Pine

White Pine Touring's groomed track at the PC Golf Course is free if you have your own gear, low-cost if you rent. We've collected enough hand-me-down kid skis from the Recycle Ski Swap that everyone has a setup. Two hours of skating around the golf course knocks the kids out for the rest of the day.

Day 10 — Lazy day, Davanza's takeout

Last day of break. Pajamas till noon. Movies. A late lunch from Davanza's — best cheap pizza in PC, also the burgers are unreasonably good for the price. We get the family pizza deal and call it.

Cheap-Eats Hierarchy

If you remember nothing else from this post, remember the cheap-eats list:

Davanza's — pizza, burgers, pinball. Always.
Squatters — takeout the kids' menu and split between three at home.
Java Cow — hot chocolate, ice cream.
El Chubasco — Mexican, family-sized portions for the price of one Main Street entree.
Maxwell's — split a pizza three ways, you'll be fine.

Avoid Main Street sit-down dinners with three kids during the holiday week — you will pay $200 minimum and your kids will eat three french fries.

The Mistake We Used to Make

We used to try to fill every day with a Park City Activity, capital A. The expensive kind. Lessons, paid tubing, lift tickets, restaurant meals. Three days in we'd realize we had spent $1,200 and the kids were tired and over-stimulated. The 80/20 ratio came out of just paying attention to what they actually liked, which was: sledding with friends, hot chocolate, the library, and being allowed to be bored. The Olympic Park walk-around might be the single highest-rated activity Liam has ever done, by the metric of how often he asks to go back, and it costs nothing.

Park City is an expensive town to live in and a more expensive one to play tourist in, and I think a lot of new families panic the first winter break and blow through their entire activity budget by Day 4. You don't have to. The free stuff here is genuinely good — better than the free stuff in most places — and your kids do not know or care that you didn't book the dog-sled tour. Save the money for the Sprinter, the rafts, or your spring break trip to Moab, which is up next on this blog. The river weather is closer than you think.