Ski trip report

Dave P and I flew into SLC on saturday after a short layover in denver. Neither of us have flown frontier before so we were pleasantly suprised when we got on the plane and we had more than normal coach leg room + every seat has a TV that you can watch 1 of 25 or so stations of live tv for $5. The channel selection is pretty decent so we took advantage of it. Frontier is now my second choice to sun country. We stayed at the Cliff Lodge at snowbird which I also would reccomend as it was nice and the ski in ski out was great.

Sunday's skiing was just a normal old day of skiing and nothing worth talking about. We were sleeping by 10pm sunday night as it had started snowing and monday was looking to be really good early. I was up naturally monday by 5:45am and we were in the lift line by 8:30 (the lifts open at 9). It had snowed about 15" and We got the 2nd tram and were able to make some awesome first tracks on some great runs. The runs were the type of runs you pray and pray for. Sick powder and my new skis handle it wayyyy better than my old ones. By like 1pm everything had been tracked out/was bumpy and our legs were giving in due to the high water content snow so we decided to call it an afternoon.

It was supposed to snow another 6" or so after the lifts shut down monday turning to partly cloudy for tuesday so we were hoping it was going to be a good day. We woke up early again on tuesday but the snow report only reported 4" new so we were a little heasatant to get up, but convinced ourselves after a couple of minutes. Little did we know how huge of a mistake not getting up early would have been. We opened the drapes and it was a complete bluebird day. Not a cloud in site. We made it out a little later than the previous day...845 or so but still were able to grab the 3rd tram which didn't matter as we found a couple of perfect virgin snow lines. It was "only" 6 or so inches, but it was super buttery on top of a soft snow base. If the day would have ended there, I would have said it was the best run of the trip. Little did we know what was in store.

We grabbed another 2 sweet powder runs and were riding up the lift when we noticed a 10 or so person pile-up at the closed gate of an area that hadn't opened in 3 days...road to provo. As we were getting off the lift it surely seemed like it was going to open so we went over to it. Literally as soon as dave strapped into his board they dropped the rope and the race was on. As we rushed to get moving we agreed to just meet at the bottom and gogoogogo and not wait up as runs like this don't happen very often. The 20 inches from the previous 2 days hadn't been touched. It was a perfect run in the making: bluebird, 2 feet of snow, a decently long run with a nice pitch to boot. It was by far the best run I've had in years. I had fresh tracks from top to bottom. I guess I did cross one other persons tracks once when I had to exit a chute. Finally. I've been dreaming of runs like that forever and have been having horrible luck. Now I ran good on being at the top for the drop. We did a few more laps before it got pretty tracked and then I took a couple laps on a farther out line that required a little bit of sidestep/hiking up. These runs were all very unreal and better than anything I've had in probably 3 years, but still nothing compaired to that first run. Smiles from ear to ear. Everyone in the liftline kept saying how epic it was. It was sick. On our last run of the day we stopped mid-bowl and just hung out and took it all in for like 10 minutes. Just sitting in the middle of nowhere in the mountains and all this snow and perfect sun is sooo beautiful and peaceful.

Dave hadn't snowboarded in like 5 years and is now officially hooked again. It would be hard not to be after this trip. Simply amazing.

A couple vids: