ACROSS THE COUNTRY
A Utah Mountain Town Brings Back an Old Idea: The One-Room Schoolhouse
As a throwback ski destination, Alta, thinks small, with a one-room public school to match.
WHY WE’RE HERE
We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In Utah, a one-room schoolhouse has helped preserve the family atmosphere of a cult-favorite ski town.
By Kate Zernike
Photographs by Ruth Fremson
Reporting from Alta, Utah
April 21, 2024
As long as it has had a ski resort, Alta, Utah, has been a place where young people come to work for a season before starting life in the real world, then end up staying for two or 10 or 20 years — even a lifetime.
They come for the powder snow, which regularly tops lists of the deepest and lightest in the country. They discover the simplicity and warmth of life in a town at the dead end of a box canyon with a year-round population of roughly 300.
But a little more than 20 years ago, town officials realized that as much as Alta prided itself on being a place where generations of families return to vacation every year, it was losing families among the employees who make it run. Young people who had children left because there was no school, and the closest school district would not send a bus up the narrow canyon road.
