Days 15-24: Same as it ever was.
I spent the last 10 days taking a vacation from my normal life. That meant that things here at FTO more or less ground to a halt, too, save for the postings in these forums from our regular readers. Thanks, folks, for keeping things interesting. We've now got a ton of catching up to do.
I spent each of these 10 days skiing at Alta. With the current snow conditions I saw little point in venturing anywhere else. At least we had the holidays. Mira and Sima were visiting from NYC, and mrgskier has been out here with his whole family this week. rdwore is also back in town for the rest of the winter. If we didn't have much snow, at least it was reunion week around here. Our band of misfits gathered at my house for Christmas Eve, AmyZ's for Christmas dinner and skidog's for an East Coast New Year's Eve, complete with cigars imported from a country that shall not be named. Good times.
The situation is grim, but not hopeless. We're lucky to be able to ski as much of the mountain as we are, and by choosing your lines carefully you can avoid the obvious potential for rock damage. The High T still isn't skiable but at least we're able to enjoy Backside, which has by and large been skiing rather well. So have lines off Baldy Shoulder. A couple of times this week we got an inch or two of new snow, which made a world of difference. Holiday crowds were unusually light, so things didn't get hammered too badly. I pulled into the Wildcat lot on New Year's Day, typically quiet anyway, at nearly 11 a.m. to find it maybe 20% full. I'd hate to see what this week has done to ski resort coffers.
Perhaps the most defeating aspect of everything is that the 10-day forecast continues to look rather bleak. It could be worse, for as frustrating as things are they're better than they are in 90% or more of the country right now.
Here's the period in pictures:
I spent the last 10 days taking a vacation from my normal life. That meant that things here at FTO more or less ground to a halt, too, save for the postings in these forums from our regular readers. Thanks, folks, for keeping things interesting. We've now got a ton of catching up to do.
I spent each of these 10 days skiing at Alta. With the current snow conditions I saw little point in venturing anywhere else. At least we had the holidays. Mira and Sima were visiting from NYC, and mrgskier has been out here with his whole family this week. rdwore is also back in town for the rest of the winter. If we didn't have much snow, at least it was reunion week around here. Our band of misfits gathered at my house for Christmas Eve, AmyZ's for Christmas dinner and skidog's for an East Coast New Year's Eve, complete with cigars imported from a country that shall not be named. Good times.
The situation is grim, but not hopeless. We're lucky to be able to ski as much of the mountain as we are, and by choosing your lines carefully you can avoid the obvious potential for rock damage. The High T still isn't skiable but at least we're able to enjoy Backside, which has by and large been skiing rather well. So have lines off Baldy Shoulder. A couple of times this week we got an inch or two of new snow, which made a world of difference. Holiday crowds were unusually light, so things didn't get hammered too badly. I pulled into the Wildcat lot on New Year's Day, typically quiet anyway, at nearly 11 a.m. to find it maybe 20% full. I'd hate to see what this week has done to ski resort coffers.
Perhaps the most defeating aspect of everything is that the 10-day forecast continues to look rather bleak. It could be worse, for as frustrating as things are they're better than they are in 90% or more of the country right now.
Here's the period in pictures:
