Alta, UT 2/20/11

[Admin]

Day 51: Interlodged.

LCC is now closed, but I'm here at Goldminer's with about 30 others, including Dale, Skrad and Jamey Parks. Skidog tried to make it but arrived 6 minutes after they closed the road at 6:00 a.m. We went into full Interlodge at 6:30 a.m. For those unfamiliar with the term, it happens in Alta/Snowbird during times of heavy snowfall resulting in high avalanche risk. Leaving in any way the building you're occupying when Interlodge is declared is a Class B misdemeanor punishable by something like 6 months in jail and/or a $500 fine.

I made it into the canyon at 5:45 a.m., and it looked like 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning as a 30 mph Red Snake wound its way up the canyon. It's positively puking here right now, with nearly 2 feet measured since the storm began Saturday morning and another 8-12 predicted by 5 p.m. today. Snowcats are working hard outside to move all of the new snow. The parking lot in the dark and heavy snowfall was like a giant choreographed dance with the lights of massive road graders, bucket loaders and driving snow blowers dancing at high speed across the Wildcat parking lot.

Bobby Danger just called, and from the other end of the phone said only "Dick." We ought to have a few country club runs before the masses arrive.

 

[Admin]

A small group waits:

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[Admin]

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[Admin]

 

[Admin]

OK, I'm crazy enough to get up at 5am to beat the road closure. I'm not crazy enough to line up in the vestibule waiting for Interlodge to be lifted, only to line up for Collins 75 minutes before it opens, when there are at most only several hundred people here.

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[Admin]

The road's still closed, and we're still Interlodged. The ski area should open soon with the road still closed! \/

 

[Admin]

Orgasmic. Astounding. Unbelievable.

Oh, and did I mention deep, too?

Interlodge was no big deal. We watched it puke snow after the sun came up.

I brought my laptop and got some FTO work done, then had a full breakfast once the kitchen opened at 7 a.m. Interlodge was lifted around 9 a.m. It was so worth going up ahead of this morning's 6 am road closure, for I hear it took some people 3 hours to get up the canyon this morning. That is, until they closed the road to uphill traffic because the canyon had reached what they felt was a comfortable capacity in this weather. I heard that LCC was backed up beyond BCC this morning.

But because we were already there, the bigger the traffic jam the better as far as I was concerned. Skidog arrived at the canyon mouth minutes after it closed, and sat there at the front of the line. They opened the road shortly after 9 a.m., a half hour later than planned. We were on Collins around 9:20 just as Skidog was pulling into the parking lot. It took most others much, much longer.

Thanks to all of that, we got in a few runs of country club skiing. Dale and I pushed out the High T, meaning to go to Watson Line but the traverse wasn't cut yet past Spruce Forest, so we dropped down an untracked right half of Race Hill. Unreal. Surreal. Face shots on every turn, billowing over the head on most. We couldn't believe our good fortune. But no one had pressed out Race Hill beyond the first pitch and we weren't about to slog through the flat, so we cut down to the Saddle Traverse across to Lower Sunspot, which frankly wasn't steep enough for all of this snow. While doing so we spotted Tele Jon and Skidog riding overhead.

The High T was fully set by the time we got back up for our second run. Absolute untracked down Watson Line, using the stunted trees for visibility. I somehow lost Dale in there, but ran into Jon and Skidog shortly thereafter.

We were on Wildcat when we first saw Bobby Danger. We pretty much rode Wildcat for the rest of the day, and the masses really didn't arrive in large numbers until around 11 a.m.

You had to be careful to not flatten out too much and bog down, as happened to the guy in the photo above. We did it ourselves when we got too greedy in Punch Bowl and got too low. Bridge Shot was unbelievable, so unbelievable that the other three continued all the way down to Powder Ridge and caught a ride back to the ski area. Even at lunchtime, Warm Up right off the Wildcat Ridge was largely untracked. More face shots as we dodged flailing, floundering folks unaccustomed to skiing in deep powder snow. I've never seen so much human carnage on a single slope.

After lunch we heard mixed messages about the road, but the common thread in what we heard was that the road would be closing again to downhill traffic around 2 p.m. Having been up since 5 a.m. I was in no mood to get stuck up there indefinitely, plus with all of the gates closed today tomorrow promises to be off the charts. I'm hoping to get in a couple of hours in the morning.

 

[Bobby Danger]

that was skiing in l.c.c the way we know it . the road closed at two thirty for one hour to blast a couple of suspect chutes west of snowbird just to be sure.

 

[Tony Crocker]

It was so worth going up ahead of this morning's 6 am road closure, for I hear it took some people 3 hours to get up the canyon this morning.

[-o< [-o< Yes, this seems much more sensible than sitting in one's car at the bottom of the canyon for who knows how long. Plus the upside if you get lucky with a time gap between lift and road opening is immense.

Were you able to figure this out in advance from the weather/avy report? Would you have known if the LCC ski areas were going to be closed all morning and thus better to go somewhere else?

 

[Admin]

Were you able to figure this out in advance from the weather/avy report?

I had my source.

Would you have known if the LCC ski areas were going to be closed all morning and thus better to go somewhere else?

If you can figure out in advance just how much production you're going to get out of avi shelling, I'm sure that UDOT would love to hire you. That's about as good as a crystal ball.