Columnist Susan Snyder: Catching a drift in snowy Utah

Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2003 | 9:19 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

We'd have been better off if we'd used the chains to bar our hotel room door last weekend.

Putting them on the car in the fifth-worst winter storm Utah has seen in 75 years only made us believe that people can actually live that way.

You think Utah cities roll up their streets early? Ha! Try to find an open restaurant when two feet of snow clogs the roads and strips electricity from more than 70,000 homes and businesses.

By Friday morning even the people staying at ski resorts in Salt Lake City's Big and Little Cottonwood canyons weren't allowed to hit the slopes until avalanche precautions could be taken.

That seemed totally fair to those of us staying in the valley who had no hope of navigating the drift-choked canyons.

For the record, "8" is a shoe size, not a temperature.

We never dreamed there could be too much snow to ski. The type of storm that slammed Utah last weekend must be the reason Las Vegas gets 6,000 new residents a month.

"So, what's it like living in Las Vegas?" queried the owner of the U.S. Olympic Spirit Store in Salt Lake City's Crossroads Plaza.

Well, we couldn't ski. What else was there to do but shop? (For those who care to keep track, a day of not skiing costs $80.)

Nearly two years later, the 2002 Winter Olympic Games still sell. The Crossroads store devoted to pins, gear and knickknacks is one of six the guy said he owns with his brother.

They will close all six locations for good in February, on the event's two-year anniversary.

Pins that once sold for $7.50 each are now two-for-one deals or sold for upwards of $150 apiece, depending on which ones they are.

As I plucked pins depicting a jug of red punch and a cup of orange fry sauce -- stereotypical Utah fare -- I mentioned they would go well with my Olympic bowl of green Jell-O pin.

"You have a green Jell-O pin? Is it one of the originals?" the guy asked. "If it is, it's worth about $150."

Right.

"I sold two of them yesterday at $130 each. But they're going for about $150," he said.

Well, I didn't know if it was an original. It's been pinned to my ski jacket for a long time and survived a considerable number of face-plantings.

The way to tell, he said, is to look at the back. If it's gold, it's original. If it's silver, it's a more recent issue and worth less than $10.

"So, do you like living in Las Vegas?," the guy asked.

Well, let's see. The only snow we see is atop the Spring Mountains in the distance or inside the globes sold down at the Bonanza gift shop. It does not drift around our loins in the time it takes to walk from the curb to the door.

"Yeah, we like it," I told him. (Hey, we have enough people moving here.)

As it turned out, the back of my Jell-O pin is gold.

But it isn't worth $150.

An Internet search Monday morning revealed my pin showing Jell-O in a red-and-white bowl was not the original, which has a pale yellow bowl. It's worth about $9. That and $23 would have paid for our tire chains.

We can criticize the "What happens here, stays here" gig.

But at least what happens here most of the time ain't snow.