jkamien
Member
The snow surfaces remain bad. Two inches Monday into Tuesday helped a little. Every sort of combination of coral reef with death cookies, to rock hard pack studded with real rocks like you’d find in a low snow year in the East, to too-short stretches of silky wind drift that skied like a dream.
Upgraded to an AltaBird ticket on Wednesday, for my birthday. Snowbird probably had worse conditions than Alta on steep stuff. I mean, anything steep was REALLY scraped off. The few open entries to the Cirque looked REALLY sketchy. Is this due to the Bird’s slightly lower elevation or to the snowboard traffic? Who knows? All I know is that Snowbird was, without a doubt, a lot bonier than Alta.
Just one memorable story. As usual, Skylar and I were poking around in trees looking for snow. This led us to getting totally cliffed out at one point. Somewhere off of the Gadzoom chair-maybe Jones Avenue from the map?
After a few nice turns in lightly cut chop, we were confronted by a very steep gully, sprinkled with rocks. I decide to get past this nastiness and look for something better to skier’s left. Some side stepping and very exposed traversing, which included more than one entreaty to the Edgehold Gods, led to only worse choices and larger cliffs. So, we had to turn around.
This was where I discovered that not having taught Skylar the kick turn was a really ill-advised omission in her steep adventure skiing armament. We managed to get her turned around on this really exposed steep terrain by coaching her to execute a sitting kick turn.
More side-stepping and exposed traversing led us back to that aforementioned rocky narrow chute, but a little lower down. I figured a way into the chute that required one of those “leap of faith” turns around a rock that is really intimidating, but (almost) always is not too bad to execute. Then I had to convince Skylar that she could do it. And she did. But both of our heart rates were elevated, for sure.
https://youtu.be/zZJ326qeI3o
No complaints, though. Alta Roolz!
Upgraded to an AltaBird ticket on Wednesday, for my birthday. Snowbird probably had worse conditions than Alta on steep stuff. I mean, anything steep was REALLY scraped off. The few open entries to the Cirque looked REALLY sketchy. Is this due to the Bird’s slightly lower elevation or to the snowboard traffic? Who knows? All I know is that Snowbird was, without a doubt, a lot bonier than Alta.
Just one memorable story. As usual, Skylar and I were poking around in trees looking for snow. This led us to getting totally cliffed out at one point. Somewhere off of the Gadzoom chair-maybe Jones Avenue from the map?
After a few nice turns in lightly cut chop, we were confronted by a very steep gully, sprinkled with rocks. I decide to get past this nastiness and look for something better to skier’s left. Some side stepping and very exposed traversing, which included more than one entreaty to the Edgehold Gods, led to only worse choices and larger cliffs. So, we had to turn around.
This was where I discovered that not having taught Skylar the kick turn was a really ill-advised omission in her steep adventure skiing armament. We managed to get her turned around on this really exposed steep terrain by coaching her to execute a sitting kick turn.
More side-stepping and exposed traversing led us back to that aforementioned rocky narrow chute, but a little lower down. I figured a way into the chute that required one of those “leap of faith” turns around a rock that is really intimidating, but (almost) always is not too bad to execute. Then I had to convince Skylar that she could do it. And she did. But both of our heart rates were elevated, for sure.
https://youtu.be/zZJ326qeI3o
No complaints, though. Alta Roolz!