| Alta, Thursday 1/10/08
After a two day break (lots to do in my "nonskiing" life) I decided to take a run up LCC to see what effect the last 48 hours of snowy weather (27" reported) had had on either Alta or Snowbird. Skies were sunny and no new snow was predicted until later in the day. My "retiree" start had me leaving the house around 9:30 AM. I needed to leave Skidog a personal message, so I called him on my cell as I drove. Within a few minutes he called me back and said he would meet me at the Wildcat Lift in about an hour. The road up was totally clear, and all "avi" work had apparently been completed by the announced 9:00 AM time. There were no restrictions posted so up I headed. I booted up in the parking lot and took a couple of runs off the Collins Lift. The Snow Gods had deposited a lovely covering on top of the previous snow that the Powder Hounds had savaged the previous day. After two circuits on Collins, I spotted Skidog standing at the Wildcat Lift. We immediately went up and did several laps in the area of "Westward Ho" There was knee deep soft powder covering previous tracks. We then took a ride up Collins and decided that skiing anywhere outside the trees was not fun due to wind blown snow and very "flat" light from the increasing cloudiness the incoming front was bring in. We stayed in the trees as much as possible as we worked our way back down to the base. Again, we found lots of soft and often knee deep stuff to make turns in all the way down. I overheard someone mention that Supreme was now open, so off we went. On our first lap we again stayed in the trees and skied the area around Challenger and White Squaw. We found lots of thigh deep lines that were totally untracked. We decided to do it again. This time we thought we would work our way down a little closer to the actual lift line. Lured on by hip deep powder we ended up in a cliff area. Skidog re-conned a bit and couldn't decide whether we had a way down without encountering a cliff so we decided a "retreat" was in order. Side-stepping uphill in knee to thigh deep powder on a steep is taxing to say the least. After we found a way down I realized that my legs were "toast" and decided to call it a day. Skidog (who had worked until 3 AM the night before) also decided to call it. We took Sugerloaf back up and the Collins Return road back to the Collins area and headed down through the trees all the way to the base. Skidog checked his magic watch/altimeter and announced that we had done 9 runs for a total of 12K vertical; most of it in knee deep powder! I was truly "done" for today, and we hiked back to our cars and both headed home around 2:30. Despite my fatigue, I had enjoyed some excellent UT powder in good company and look forward to many more days of the same this winter. | 
Jan 10, 2008, 9:30 PM
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