Day 39: What did I do to piss off Ullr, anyway?
Rewind to Thursday evening. I arrive home from work and set in to relax for the evening. I never leave the house, nor does anyone else. I get up Friday morning and get ready for work. I go to grab my truck keys and they're nowhere to be found. Anywhere. I search for a bit but I'm already getting late for an important meeting, so I execute what must be a 30-point maneuver to get my wife's car out from under the carport in front of my truck and back it over the lawn and across the curb to the street.
I'm home Friday by 5 and immediately begin a 4-hour fruitless search for my truck keys. My wife and my kid spent some time searching during the day, but by evening I'm doing a carefully coordinated grid search, leaving no crevice uninspected, no furniture or appliance unmoved. I checked everywhere at least two times, including the giant trash barrel outside filled to the brim with shrimp shells, clam shells, coffee grounds and a few inches of an unidentifiable witches brew in the bottom. No keys.
I planned to ski Saturday morning but figured that I needed to attend to the key situation first. I called a locksmith who came out and after an hour of trial and error managed to cut a working ignition key. This doesn't work on the doors, though, for a few years ago my wife broke a key in the ignition while preparing to leave Montreal to drive to Utah and had to have the ignition cylinder replaced. So by noon on Saturday I have a working ignition key and the spare door opener clinging to the remains of the munched key from a few years ago. If the battery dies I'm screwed.
So it's shortly after noon that I'm tooling up LCC yesterday, being blown all over the road by the powerful winds ahead of the approaching cold front. I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it when Skidog passes me heading down canyon. He calls and tells me that the wind is hell and the skiing isn't worthwhile. I make a U-turn at Snowbird Entry 2 and go home.
Late yesterday afternoon the rain arrived in the Valley, quickly turning to snow at low elevations which it wasn't supposed to do. It also continued well into the evening, which it wasn't supposed to do, either. I went to bed with dreams of a powder day dancing in my head.
Fast forward to this morning. My phone rings, and it's Pat. I look at the clock and am shocked to see 9 am! My alarm went off at 7, I turned it off and fell back asleep. ](*,) To add insult to injury, last night's 4-8" resulted in a surprise 16" instead. I hurriedly got dressed, grabbed my stuff and was out the door by 9:18.
Tooling down Wasatch Boulevard past the gravel pit at ~6800 South I see brake lights and traffic grinds to a hault. Unbelievably, traffic backed up to enter LCC stretches to north of BCC!! :shock: I've never seen this before!
I was determined to jockey to an advantage, ducking down Ft. Union, cutting over to Bengal and Danish Rd and then zipping along Wasatch to the 9400 S intersection where traffic was backed up to make the left turn toward the canyon. I went straight through the intersection and made a U-turn so that I could make it a right turn instead.
I inched toward the canyon. I didn't get to board Wildcat until nearly 11 a.m. In all my normal 20-25 minute drive turned into 70 minutes. You'd think that this was a powder day or something! :lol:
And it was. With all of those people liftlines were large and things got tracked out even more quickly than normal, but we still had a few aces up our sleeves. Suffice it to say that the last run was the best, an entirely untracked slope inbounds for about 700 verts at 3:45 p.m. Yes, this is possible, even in LCC.
The new snow was 7-8%, sufficiently dense to hide the old snow beneath on all but the most sun-affected slopes. Runs that were heavily moguled before the storm held a few surprises with troughs hidden by the new snow, but even where tracked up the snow was soft and fluffy.
Another great day in the Wasatch!
Poor visibility means that I barely used the camera today, but I did get one cell phone shot of the parking lot heading up the hill on Wasatch south of BCC:
Rewind to Thursday evening. I arrive home from work and set in to relax for the evening. I never leave the house, nor does anyone else. I get up Friday morning and get ready for work. I go to grab my truck keys and they're nowhere to be found. Anywhere. I search for a bit but I'm already getting late for an important meeting, so I execute what must be a 30-point maneuver to get my wife's car out from under the carport in front of my truck and back it over the lawn and across the curb to the street.
I'm home Friday by 5 and immediately begin a 4-hour fruitless search for my truck keys. My wife and my kid spent some time searching during the day, but by evening I'm doing a carefully coordinated grid search, leaving no crevice uninspected, no furniture or appliance unmoved. I checked everywhere at least two times, including the giant trash barrel outside filled to the brim with shrimp shells, clam shells, coffee grounds and a few inches of an unidentifiable witches brew in the bottom. No keys.
I planned to ski Saturday morning but figured that I needed to attend to the key situation first. I called a locksmith who came out and after an hour of trial and error managed to cut a working ignition key. This doesn't work on the doors, though, for a few years ago my wife broke a key in the ignition while preparing to leave Montreal to drive to Utah and had to have the ignition cylinder replaced. So by noon on Saturday I have a working ignition key and the spare door opener clinging to the remains of the munched key from a few years ago. If the battery dies I'm screwed.
So it's shortly after noon that I'm tooling up LCC yesterday, being blown all over the road by the powerful winds ahead of the approaching cold front. I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it when Skidog passes me heading down canyon. He calls and tells me that the wind is hell and the skiing isn't worthwhile. I make a U-turn at Snowbird Entry 2 and go home.
Late yesterday afternoon the rain arrived in the Valley, quickly turning to snow at low elevations which it wasn't supposed to do. It also continued well into the evening, which it wasn't supposed to do, either. I went to bed with dreams of a powder day dancing in my head.
Fast forward to this morning. My phone rings, and it's Pat. I look at the clock and am shocked to see 9 am! My alarm went off at 7, I turned it off and fell back asleep. ](*,) To add insult to injury, last night's 4-8" resulted in a surprise 16" instead. I hurriedly got dressed, grabbed my stuff and was out the door by 9:18.
Tooling down Wasatch Boulevard past the gravel pit at ~6800 South I see brake lights and traffic grinds to a hault. Unbelievably, traffic backed up to enter LCC stretches to north of BCC!! :shock: I've never seen this before!
I was determined to jockey to an advantage, ducking down Ft. Union, cutting over to Bengal and Danish Rd and then zipping along Wasatch to the 9400 S intersection where traffic was backed up to make the left turn toward the canyon. I went straight through the intersection and made a U-turn so that I could make it a right turn instead.
I inched toward the canyon. I didn't get to board Wildcat until nearly 11 a.m. In all my normal 20-25 minute drive turned into 70 minutes. You'd think that this was a powder day or something! :lol:
And it was. With all of those people liftlines were large and things got tracked out even more quickly than normal, but we still had a few aces up our sleeves. Suffice it to say that the last run was the best, an entirely untracked slope inbounds for about 700 verts at 3:45 p.m. Yes, this is possible, even in LCC.
The new snow was 7-8%, sufficiently dense to hide the old snow beneath on all but the most sun-affected slopes. Runs that were heavily moguled before the storm held a few surprises with troughs hidden by the new snow, but even where tracked up the snow was soft and fluffy.
Another great day in the Wasatch!
Poor visibility means that I barely used the camera today, but I did get one cell phone shot of the parking lot heading up the hill on Wasatch south of BCC:
:x Still, mighty fine skiing. Shame you didn't make it up early enough.
