Not a bad start!

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On the 4^th of January, we skied the backcountry in front ofAlta, named Cardiff. The sun was out and the weather was really nice.

The avy conditions right now are not pushing you into skiing the steep and deep, it pushes you more into mellow and treed terrain. One of the problem it that it looks sketchy pretty much everywhere around North America; BC, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington… it seems that it won’t be a great year for backcountry skiing.

The next day, we skied Snowbird Ski Resort, the ski conditions were improving really fast each run we were skiing, since a heavy storm was coming in.

Snowbird has a lot of advanced terrain with a lot of good skiers, even then, we found countless lines in the trees, mainly deserved by the Tram. It is for sure one of the best ski resorts in Utah for the terrain and the powder.

After all that day of snowing, the road to go back to Salt Lake City (where we usually sleep) was restricted to 4 X 4 or chains, which of course we don’t have…..

So we decided to sleep up in the mountains in our car, it kept snowing heavily throughout the night. As expected, we were woked up by the US Marshalls at 5h45 am, because they were gonna do some avalanche control. They ordered us to enter the closest building to be in a safe place. The closest building happened to be the luxurious hotel of the town, Rustler Lodge. They were forced to accept us for the time of the bombing which lasted a couple of hours meaning we got to appreciate the full all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet with even real maple syrup!!!

Don’t have to tell you that it was a pretty good day to be skiing at Alta with over 24inches in 24 hours. We even tought for some times that the road would remain closed like last year but it finally opened before the lifts. Even if the lifts opened later than usually, and that a lot of the snow was upside-down (heavier snow on top of lighter snow), it was another really good Alta-fix.

Since the Avy danger didn’t really mellow out, we decided to check out Brighton. The overall conditions were really good with the snow from the last storm. The blue sky shows up, so we pretty much skied all over the resort.

Even if the resort has really good slack-country, we stick our turns inbounds… A closed call happened about 100 feet from the resort boundary, when a boarder triggered a slab with a crown around 7 feet deep! He was lucky enough that is snowboard got stuck in the trees and that he didn’t go for the full 500 feet ride.

We were just about to leave the resort when another storm of 8+inches fell overnight. We had planned a day off, but were forced to ski…. Again.

We only enjoy the morning runs and than stopped around lunch.

We are still not decided if we are going to stay around here or move.