Day 44: No junk show required.
We realized early on yesterday that the Cottonwoods were going to be a zoo today. Sure enough, the LCC road didn't open until 9:15 this morning and I'm sure that many didn't pull into the parking lots until substantially later than that. I assured the Alta Powder Posse that there's legitimate terrain at PCMR and with the storm total matching that in LCC we could have the same snow with no fuss, no muss.
It worked:
It rained in old town Park City most of Saturday night, but that only affected the lower 200 vertical feet or so. Above that everything was all snow, with drier snow falling the higher you went. Once we got up the mountain via Crescent and Silverlode we never dropped below the bottom of Pioneer on the McConkey's side and the bottom of Motherlode in Thaynes Canyon on the other. No one seems to ski the trees over there, and diving through through the aspens and conifers yielded turn after turn of untracked in a way reminiscent of eastern tree skiing. Terrain in Jupiter, Motherlode Meadows and Pioneer Ridge delivered endless runs of freshies until we finally screamed uncle at 4:30 and retired to beers in the parking lot.
I'll mostly let today's photos do the talking.
We realized early on yesterday that the Cottonwoods were going to be a zoo today. Sure enough, the LCC road didn't open until 9:15 this morning and I'm sure that many didn't pull into the parking lots until substantially later than that. I assured the Alta Powder Posse that there's legitimate terrain at PCMR and with the storm total matching that in LCC we could have the same snow with no fuss, no muss.
It worked:
It rained in old town Park City most of Saturday night, but that only affected the lower 200 vertical feet or so. Above that everything was all snow, with drier snow falling the higher you went. Once we got up the mountain via Crescent and Silverlode we never dropped below the bottom of Pioneer on the McConkey's side and the bottom of Motherlode in Thaynes Canyon on the other. No one seems to ski the trees over there, and diving through through the aspens and conifers yielded turn after turn of untracked in a way reminiscent of eastern tree skiing. Terrain in Jupiter, Motherlode Meadows and Pioneer Ridge delivered endless runs of freshies until we finally screamed uncle at 4:30 and retired to beers in the parking lot.
I'll mostly let today's photos do the talking.
