About the Guide to the Best of Park City
The Guide to the Best of Park City is published by TownLift, the locally owned newsroom that has covered Park City and Summit County since 2020. We built this guide for one reason: the recommendations visitors find online usually come from people who have never spent a winter here, never waited for the Old Town lift on a powder morning, and never had to figure out where to eat on a Tuesday in April when half of Main Street is closed for mud season.
We have. So has everyone who works on this guide.
Two things live here, and they support each other. The first is a free trip planner that builds a personalized itinerary around when you are coming, who you are traveling with, and what you actually want to do. The second is Ask Park City, a continuously updating set of community rankings where verified locals, seasonal residents, and repeat visitors vote on the best pizza, the best trail, the best place to take out-of-town parents. One tells you what to do with your trip. The other tells you what the people who live here actually think.
Who is behind this
Brian Modena, founder and publisher. Brian founded TownLift in 2020 after more than twenty years living in mountain communities. He is a Park City resident and has spent his career building media and marketing businesses across the Mountain West. TownLift is locally owned and operated, not part of a media chain and not backed by outside investors, which means the decisions about what gets covered and what gets recommended are made by people who live in the same town as the readers.
Brandi Christoffersen, lead curator. Brandi leads recommendation curation for the guide, deciding which activities, businesses, and seasonal experiences earn a place here and writing much of the on-the-ground detail you will find on activity and guide pages. Brandi is a longtime resident of Park City and an avid reader and storyteller. During her time as a freelance writer, she has had the privilege to interview many local personalities, and to research, explore and shine light on this amazing town and state. She has written for many local publications including Park Record, City Weekly, Utah Stories, Utah Life, PC Style, Salt Lake Magazine and Mountain Magazine.
The TownLift newsroom. Our reporters cover this valley every day, and that reporting is the ground truth underneath the guide. Marina Knight, Rebecca Brenner, Heather Bergeson, Michele Roepke, and Kirsten Kohlwey cover news, features, sports, community, and arts and entertainment across Park City, Summit County, Heber, Kamas, Midway, Coalville, Oakley, and Snyderville. When a restaurant changes hands, a trail closes for restoration, or a new lift opens, we know because we are the ones reporting it.
Every activity and guide page carries an author byline linking to that writer's profile. If you want to know who told you something, you can find out.
How the trip planner works
Answer five short questions at Create your guide: when you are visiting, how long you are staying, who you are traveling with, your budget, and what you are interested in. We detect the season from your dates, because Park City in February and Park City in July are functionally different towns, and we build a set of recommendations from there. It takes about a minute and it is free.
What you get back is curated, not scraped. The activities, restaurants, and experiences we surface are ones our team has vetted. Lodging suggestions come from live inventory matched to your budget.
We are honest about the limits. A generated guide is a starting point, not a substitute for calling ahead in a mountain town where hours shift with the weather and the season. Where timing matters, we say so.
How the community rankings work
Ask Park City is the part of this site that no aggregator, scraper, or AI summarizer can copy, because it is built from verified human opinion that keeps accumulating.
Here is the full method, so you can judge it for yourself.
Anyone can nominate. Only verified members can vote. Voting requires a confirmed email account. There is no anonymous voting.
One person, one vote, per question. Each verified member casts exactly one vote on a given question. This is enforced at the database level, not by an honor system. Members can nominate several businesses on the same question, but a nomination is a suggestion, not a vote, and carries no weight of its own. Members can move their vote at any time if they change their mind.
We label who is voting. On their first vote, members tell us whether they are a Park City local, a seasonal resident, or a visitor. Rankings show the breakdown, so you can see whether a restaurant is a local favorite or a visitor favorite. Those are often not the same list, and the difference is useful.
Nominations and quotes are moderated before they appear. A nomination is reviewed and approved before it counts publicly. Reader quotes never appear on the site without editorial approval.
We actively defend against vote manipulation. Email addresses are canonicalized so that dot variations and plus-sign sub-addressing collapse to a single identity, which stops one inbox from generating many votes. Disposable and throwaway email domains are rejected at sign-in. Votes are capped per network address, generous enough for a household or an office but not for a single machine running up a score. All voting endpoints are rate limited. Clicks from people who abandon before verifying are recorded for our own funnel analysis and never count toward a public ranking.
No close date. Rankings are not an annual contest that goes stale eleven months of the year. They update continuously as new votes come in.
We will also tell you what this method cannot do. A determined person with many real email addresses and rotating network access could still influence a ranking. Email canonicalization and the disposable-domain block are our durable defenses, and we retain voter network data so our administrators can detect coordinated patterns. If you see a ranking that looks wrong, tell us and we will look at the underlying data.
Browse the results at Local Favorites or cast a vote at Ask Park City.
How we make money, in plain terms
We think you should know this before you trust a recommendation, so we are putting it on the About page rather than burying it.
Local businesses can pay for featured placement. Businesses can claim their listing for free and can pay to upgrade to a featured position, which is labeled as such. Paid placement buys visibility. It does not buy a ranking, a vote, or a good review.
Paid placement never touches Ask Park City. Community rankings are determined entirely by verified member votes. There is no mechanism, purchasable or otherwise, for a business to affect its position in a community ranking. Advertisers are not told in advance how they rank, and they cannot pay to have a competitor removed.
Some lodging and booking links are affiliate links. If you book through one of them, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Which properties appear in your personalized guide is determined by your stated budget and dates, not by commission rate.
TownLift's news coverage is independent of this guide's advertisers. Being a Best of Park City advertiser earns a business no favorable treatment, and no protection from unfavorable coverage, in TownLift's reporting. That firewall is the reason the newsroom is worth anything, and we are not trading it for ad revenue.
We accept corrections. If something here is wrong, outdated, or misleading, email us and we will fix it and note the change. Businesses close, trails wash out, and prices change. Accuracy is maintenance, not a one-time achievement.
Contact us
Guide to the Best of Park City Published by TownLift 1090 Center Dr, Park City, UT 84098 (435) 631-9555 info@bestofparkcity.com
News tips for TownLift: tips@townlift.com
Corrections and factual disputes about this guide: info@bestofparkcity.com
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TOWNLIFT is a registered trademark of TownLift, Inc., U.S. Reg. No. 6588910.
Last reviewed: August 4, 2026