The Sports Illustrated Olympic Daily is published in Salt Lake City and available in event venues and on newsstands for 16 straight days during the 2002 Winter Games. Here are some sights and scenes from today’s edition:

City Limits

Does Salt Lake seem a bit tame? Just think of it as a jumping-off point for the mountainous winter playland that's waiting out yonder

The elite athletes who sail off the Utah Olympic Park hills this week are not the first to discover the joys of ski flying here. Bob Martin

What distinguishes salt lake City is not its choir, not its genealogical records and not its bizarrely complicated drinking laws (guess what, heavy beer is not the opposite of light beer), but an upturned crust of rock called the Wasatch Mountain Range, a north-south ridge of the Rockies that looms to the east of the city. The peaks in this range run 9,000 to 10,000 feet and are divided by huge glaciated canyons and, in winter months, are covered by upward of 500 inches of dry, fluffy snow. When you're on top of them the last thing on your mind is the view to the northwest (what's that briny lowland?) or below (kind of a generic-looking metropolis, wouldn't you say?). All you can think is, Wouldn't it be fun to slide down those canyons, one way or another?

It would, it is, it always has been. The miners who showed up here after prospecting for gold in the Sierras (pocking these canyon walls in search of silver, lead and zinc) were immediately adept at snow travel, whizzing around in "flip-flops," as their wooden skis were known. Col. Patrick Conner's Third California Infantry, sent here in 1862 to keep an eye on this Brigham Young fellow, soon found this was the only way to go as well. The soldiers, transferring skills first developed in California mountains, were probably the area's first downhill skiers, although it was more an issue of transportation than sports.

Back in the 19th century there were no high-speed quads or four-day ski packages. Alta, which is now a low-frills ski destination at the end of Big Cottonwood Canyon, was strictly a mining town in the mid- and late-1800s (as was Park City, today's gentrified resort that is host to the Olympic events of Alpine giant slalom and snowboard), although the nightlife was considerably less temperate than down the hill, where Young was settling his new followers. Alta had 26 saloons and six breweries, and not one of them required a "membership." Still, the example of these miners and soldiers gliding around on 14-foot-long boards (if not bellying up to the bar) was soon embraced by the citizenry during the back-to-nature movement at the turn of the century. There were clubs, organized outings, plenty of healthy schussing.

The most galvanizing movement in Utah ski history, though, was the Norwegian immigration -- lots of homesick ski jumpers, some lured by Mormon missionaries, others just spreading out from Scandinavian hot spots in Chicago and Minnesota not long after 1910. Like any other newcomers to the area, they were first transfixed by the mountains and their downhill possibilities, except the Norwegians knew more possibilities than the natives did.

In 1915 some of these new arrivals, known as the Norwegian Young Folks Society, organized the first local ski jumping competition. It was a definite success, with 5,000 people showing up to see somebody sail upward of 80 feet. This caught on big. And although the jumpers were almost all Norwegian, some locals began taking notice.

Jack Walker was a kid who started skiing with his buddies in the valleys not long after. He wasn't Norwegian (later, in emulation, he toyed with spelling his name backward -- Reklaw Kcaj), but he was aware of these new daredevils, with names like Trogstad and Engen, who were getting strange air off a wooden roller-coaster-looking ramp on Becker Hill in Ogden. Intrigued, he bought a pair of longer, grooved skis from Scott Hardware in downtown Ogden and, even as he was lugging the skis out of the store, caught the attention of a fierce-looking guy with poor English.

"He tapped me on my shoulder," says Walker, now 86 and still an active skier, "looked at my skis and told me about a huge jumping hill they were building near Parleys Summit [now an exit off I-80 on the way to Park City, where the Olympic ski jumping competition will be held]. Said I should come on up there."

The fierce-looking guy was Halvar Hvalstad, a member of a professional ski jumping team (12 of the 14 were Norwegian) that operated out of the area, barnstorming throughout the West and Midwest. The billing, sampled here from the Ogden Examiner, was even less coy than it might have been in these sensational times: spectacular thrills add to excitement as norwegians hurl selves into space down side of steep mountain. Up to that time the Norwegians had used hills in Salt Lake and Ogden. In fact, at Ogden's Becker Hill a Norwegian by the name of Einar Fredbo flew a hill record of 203 feet in 1931, so it was worth watching. According to Alan Engen, whose father, Alf, was a Norwegian champion before coming to Salt Lake in 1929, jumps like that "got the crowd's attention." Alan, who is now ski director at Alta and who has written two histories of skiing in Utah, says it was not unusual to have thousands show up for a competition. Some would just sit in their cars, ringed around the landing, their lights on.

Soon the action moved to Ecker Hill at Parleys Summit because of its engineering and because the snow was more reliable there. The site became popular on the barnstorming tour, and skiers would compete for purses. Hvalstad won the first event there in 1930, sailing 142 feet, but that proved to be nothing. The next year, after the hill had been remodeled, Alf Engen set the world record with a jump of 247 feet. Within the year he moved the mark to 266 feet. Engen, who was becoming the Michael Jordan of his sport, especially in Utah where there weren't many other champions, pushed it to 281 feet the next year (and to the hill record of 296 in 1934). According to his son's book For the Love of Skiing, it wasn't pure fun for the jumper. "It's fun jumping even as far as 200 feet," Engen said, "but when you try to go any farther than that, the possibility of serious injury is so great that most of the joy is taken out of the sport."

From the spectator's point of view, though, it could hardly be more exciting. That led to participation, however modest the scale. Walker and his childhood buddy Vern Nichols took the fierce Norwegian up on his invitation and found themselves skipping school from time to time to visit the hill. They'd get up at 3 a.m., get a ride with a friendly milkman to the Wel Come Inn on the hill and then, if nobody else was around, pack the ramp with their skis. Using the B hill that ran alongside it, the boys worked up their courage for the big ramp.

Walker was properly wary of that big jump, but he knew he wanted to try it. By way of preparation, he was near the takeoff one day watching a fellow amateur make his first jump off the A hill. "To do that was a tremendous thrill," Walker says, "to fly off with nothing underneath you, like dropping from a 15-story building, ready to hit pavement." On that day, Feb. 22, 1934, Calmar Andreasen did indeed "hit pavement," having been flipped in the wind. He was -- surprisingly, considering the equipment used and the distances attempted -- the only person to die on Ecker Hill.

Ski jumping persisted in the region, but as other skiing disciplines grew, interest in jumping waned. Also, that original barnstorming team began to wither and disbanded before 1935. Turns out, there were attractive alternatives to barnstorming. Jumpers could regain amateur status if they stayed truly amateur for a year, and with the '36 Olympics coming, that seemed a nice alternative to, say, traveling to Strum, Wis., where fans expected a Diamond Jump (four skiers crisscrossing one another on the way down the hill).

Unfortunately for Alf Engen, even a year away from the tour wouldn't help. In 1935 he was chosen as one of four winter-sports athletes to appear on a Wheaties box. Although Engen later complained he got nothing but Wheaties -- "plenty of Wheaties" -- he was ineligible for Olympic competition, and the world did not get to see the greatest jumper of the time.

Though ski jumping remains an Olympic event and a Salt Lake favorite (Utah Olympic Park has 90-meter and 120-meter hills that local kids have been getting 300 feet off of), even the sport's pioneers saw that it wasn't likely to appeal to the masses. Ski jumping was to skiing what wing walking was to general aviation: It got your attention but wasn't necessarily the way you wanted to travel. "It wasn't for everybody," says Walker. "Jumping on Ecker Hill petered out. People took to Alpine skiing."

For some, this was not easy. A guy like Walker, who indeed survived his first jump and became a locally decorated jumper, found he had an upward learning curve this time. "Here I was, a known, famous skier, and I couldn't even turn!" The first time Engen took Walker up Alta, "I came down on my back."

Plenty of others were willing to learn, though, and the Forest Service was alert to their interest. The service commissioned Engen to scout the canyons for a recreation area. He found Alta, and it was soon developed. (Other sites were springing up in other canyons.) The first to provide a rope tow was Brighton, in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Alta is credited with the area's first ski lift (and the country's second, after Sun Valley, Idaho). The sport was becoming user-friendly. The resorts were eager to introduce one and all to downhill skiing. Engen became an instructor at Alta and for years offered free Saturday lessons, increasing the customer base.

In the postwar boom more resorts sprang up -- Sundance, Snow Basin, Park City, Deer Valley, Snowbird, Solitude. All enjoy that unique combination of meteorological and geographical conditions that turn the desert air from the Great Salt Lake basin into powdery snow (and lots of it) with some additional downhill properties as well, just for fun.

To this day the mountains remain a rowdy presence that hovers over the decidedly sedate city below. It's not just that it's easier to get a drink in Park City, it's that sense of daredevilry that was a pioneering force above and seems absent beneath. Below, Salt Lake City is super well-educated, well-behaved and shockingly uniform in race and creed (roughly 70% of the population is at least nominally Mormon; who knows how white it actually is). It is routinely described as a great place to live, with high-tech opportunities aplenty in the Provo-Ogden corridor and some of the best recreational facilities in the world. You wouldn't pick Salt Lake City, though, no matter its underground, to become a hotbed of music, art -- anything, really.

Still, thanks to those peaks there is even in Salt Lake City a sense of grand adventure, the possibility of doing something truly crazy. Jumping into thin air, just for an example.