EMSC
Well-known member
Powder Mountain = State of Confusion
This was my first ever experience at PowMow as it is known. What a confusing place in so many ways. The trail map does a mediocre job or occasionally terrible job (Village and Mary's lifts on the main map are NOT where they seem to be shown for example). Their own employees often don't know how to navigate the place (2 solid examples of this - one per day). They didn't even bother to update their own snow report, nor what terrain was open for at least the 3 days after the Utah storminess earlier in the week. The lodges are tiny little things that should have been replaced or at least expanded years ago as well. And despite the claimed largest acreage of any resort, you best be fine with taking a picture of the trail map on your phone and trying to zoom in - the owner(s) are too cheap to bother with printed trail maps that might give better size to read.
They seem to be most interested in the acreage number than creating a really usable lift layout or many other operational improvements.
As you can tell, I was less than impressed by much of the place.
As far as I know, the only 2 sectors closed while we were there were Powder Country (too little snow/sun exposure issues), and Lefty's Canyon (closed for the season due to too few staff/patrollers to sweep it). My understanding is that many other sectors were also closed until about when we arrived. But the storm cycle was enough to get them re-opened.
It was an interesting couple of days and we did find some decent stuff to ski, but what an odd place. One of the best aspects and pretty much the only reason we went there a 2nd day was we stayed just 6 miles away on the PowMow side of Eden, UT combined with the late 9a weekend opening (we all slept in later than expected after the crash award ceremonies Sat night).
Not sure what impression newby's get from having to wait to get their $5 RFID cards. And what you see is the entire main Timberline base lodge. I suppose it's better than paper tickets which Snowbasin down the road is still doing (crazy, even pass holders have to get their passes out at the lifts each run over at Snowbasin!)
You better memorize this sucker cause you aren't getting one to put in your pocket for later (not that certain portions are very accurate to start with). At least they have a more moderate sized one at the top of each lift as near as I could tell. Those really help with planning while on the lift and part way down (end sarcasm).
We started off with a couple laps of the whole group on the Hidden Lake lift finding that some areas were firm where skied and others were still soft but not very deep powder.
Leading to the inevitable poma trip over to what ended up being Cobabe Canyon. Prime Saturday poma line here:
Not steep, but still nice snow and plenty of untracked sections left.
Eventually using the valley cat tracks/traverse to go all the way to Paradise lift and lapping back up to Hidden Lake. Much of the group stopped for lunch at this tiny lodge (took them 35-40 minutes to get food!).
While the typical 3 (including me) decided for a "Woody's World" run where a bus picks you up on the access road. My brother thinking he remembered the area rejected the main open entrance and headed on a cat track to the left, sort of following a orange jacketed PowMow guide and his two clients. We didn't know it at the time, but that would be Horizon Run headed to either the Village Lift or Lefty's canyon which was closed. A bit down the trail and a few softening low angle pow turns later, it was clear that all the gates along that cat track were closed and we didn't know why or where we were. The guide had also stopped and seemed confused. In talking with him: 1. he had a radio that was dead, 2. he claimed to have never seen any rope lines in that area ever before, 3 wasn't sure what anyone should do as to hiking back up the cat track or continuing down.
Anyway I sort of took over as I have pretty decent route finding, exposure, etc abilities, though never had skied PowMow. We ended up hiking up about 100 verts on the cat track just to gain some much needed altitude then started traversing sometimes with gravity, sometimes via poling. We cut back across the hill to where the open gate terrain had been at the start of our run, barely making it to and across a flat ridgeline separating Lefty's from Woody's. After that small scare we ended up getting some nice and still fairly deep (though dense) powder on the pitch for Pumphouse run.
From there we caught the bus up to the Sundown lift. where we skied over to the Lightning Ridge cat pickup. Nice cat usage, though I'm not sure it is really worth $25 per run. Definitely worth it for a single ride for the experience I would say. It probably ought to be ~$10/ride, value/length wise, but enough of us suckers were lined up for it they can get away with the higher pricing (apparently that cat hadn't run in quite some time until the recent storms came through).
Steepest, narrowest stairs to get on and off a cat that I can recall... Holds ~20.
You can see the cat disappearing where Nordic Valley ski area is and Snowbasin is in the upper left. I had heard the name, but never knew where Nordic Valley ski area was till now.
We found some pretty good snow after talking to a patroller. Though we also had a flounder in the deep unpacked snow too...
We ended the rapidly warming day with a couple runs on Paradise chair roughly between Lakeview 4 and Snowcatcher. That face and some of Lightning Ridge is some of the little terrain that faces N or NE. Most of the resort was softening snow surfaces, but not mush or full transition to spring at all.
That Paradise run would be Key for day #2.
Snow was back for Day #2. Starting just before opening and coming down hard initially. I was ahead of the others in getting going (I needed to dive back to Colo in the afternoon). So I made a couple laps on Timberline and Hidden Lake chairs exploring the edges to test out conditions. In General a full mixed bag, some places soft-ish, others with a firmer subsurface others had refrozen underneath. After meeting up with the late-comers we decided to try out Woodys again and instantly regretted it. That sector clearly had softened and was a mix of refrozen or thick zipper crust underneath the couple of new inches. It was all we could do to stay upright for all three of us ex-racers. Eventually I figured out that the right hand side of pine trees had blocked the sun and it was still powder there and only there. It allowed us to link 2-6 turns of soft and nice skiing in between the openings in the trees. Eventually making it to the road for bus pick-up. I was surprised it was open at all given the conditions.
Then I knew exactly where I would be skiing the rest of my short day. The line that had held soft snow and even powder at the end of the day off of Paradise. Only how to get there without wasting time. At the top of Timberline chair a resort host who was trying to be helpful seemed confused about the question of getting there without taking an entire run of valley level traverses all the way to the bottom of Paradise Chair. He also was not allowed to take anyone anywhere on anything other than groomers for liability reasons. Using my instincts instead of the supposedly local knowledge we made the traverse across and slightly below the ridge that has the upper part of Paradise chair, hitting the soft snow and powder run about 200 vertical down it's ~1200 of sustained pitch (I figure that run has ~200 verts lost at the top traversing the ridge and 200 verts lost in the collector cat track on a 1600 vert chair).
I lapped that 3 times in a row before heading back to Timberline to end my day at 1p.
I feel like I can pretty much guarantee that that was probably the best snow on the entire mountain that day since it hadn't gotten the sun from the prior day, nor been fully skied out in the previous storm cycle, whereas the vast majority of PowMow faces either East or West. I left at a good time as PowMow shut due to lightning, reopened for a bit then shut for the day early due to lightning again. With ~3" having fallen during my time there.
I'll leave you with a few select pics from the drive through Wyoming. Arriving home ~8:45p.
This was my first ever experience at PowMow as it is known. What a confusing place in so many ways. The trail map does a mediocre job or occasionally terrible job (Village and Mary's lifts on the main map are NOT where they seem to be shown for example). Their own employees often don't know how to navigate the place (2 solid examples of this - one per day). They didn't even bother to update their own snow report, nor what terrain was open for at least the 3 days after the Utah storminess earlier in the week. The lodges are tiny little things that should have been replaced or at least expanded years ago as well. And despite the claimed largest acreage of any resort, you best be fine with taking a picture of the trail map on your phone and trying to zoom in - the owner(s) are too cheap to bother with printed trail maps that might give better size to read.
They seem to be most interested in the acreage number than creating a really usable lift layout or many other operational improvements.
As you can tell, I was less than impressed by much of the place.
As far as I know, the only 2 sectors closed while we were there were Powder Country (too little snow/sun exposure issues), and Lefty's Canyon (closed for the season due to too few staff/patrollers to sweep it). My understanding is that many other sectors were also closed until about when we arrived. But the storm cycle was enough to get them re-opened.
It was an interesting couple of days and we did find some decent stuff to ski, but what an odd place. One of the best aspects and pretty much the only reason we went there a 2nd day was we stayed just 6 miles away on the PowMow side of Eden, UT combined with the late 9a weekend opening (we all slept in later than expected after the crash award ceremonies Sat night).
Not sure what impression newby's get from having to wait to get their $5 RFID cards. And what you see is the entire main Timberline base lodge. I suppose it's better than paper tickets which Snowbasin down the road is still doing (crazy, even pass holders have to get their passes out at the lifts each run over at Snowbasin!)
You better memorize this sucker cause you aren't getting one to put in your pocket for later (not that certain portions are very accurate to start with). At least they have a more moderate sized one at the top of each lift as near as I could tell. Those really help with planning while on the lift and part way down (end sarcasm).
We started off with a couple laps of the whole group on the Hidden Lake lift finding that some areas were firm where skied and others were still soft but not very deep powder.
Leading to the inevitable poma trip over to what ended up being Cobabe Canyon. Prime Saturday poma line here:
Not steep, but still nice snow and plenty of untracked sections left.
Eventually using the valley cat tracks/traverse to go all the way to Paradise lift and lapping back up to Hidden Lake. Much of the group stopped for lunch at this tiny lodge (took them 35-40 minutes to get food!).
While the typical 3 (including me) decided for a "Woody's World" run where a bus picks you up on the access road. My brother thinking he remembered the area rejected the main open entrance and headed on a cat track to the left, sort of following a orange jacketed PowMow guide and his two clients. We didn't know it at the time, but that would be Horizon Run headed to either the Village Lift or Lefty's canyon which was closed. A bit down the trail and a few softening low angle pow turns later, it was clear that all the gates along that cat track were closed and we didn't know why or where we were. The guide had also stopped and seemed confused. In talking with him: 1. he had a radio that was dead, 2. he claimed to have never seen any rope lines in that area ever before, 3 wasn't sure what anyone should do as to hiking back up the cat track or continuing down.
Anyway I sort of took over as I have pretty decent route finding, exposure, etc abilities, though never had skied PowMow. We ended up hiking up about 100 verts on the cat track just to gain some much needed altitude then started traversing sometimes with gravity, sometimes via poling. We cut back across the hill to where the open gate terrain had been at the start of our run, barely making it to and across a flat ridgeline separating Lefty's from Woody's. After that small scare we ended up getting some nice and still fairly deep (though dense) powder on the pitch for Pumphouse run.
From there we caught the bus up to the Sundown lift. where we skied over to the Lightning Ridge cat pickup. Nice cat usage, though I'm not sure it is really worth $25 per run. Definitely worth it for a single ride for the experience I would say. It probably ought to be ~$10/ride, value/length wise, but enough of us suckers were lined up for it they can get away with the higher pricing (apparently that cat hadn't run in quite some time until the recent storms came through).
Steepest, narrowest stairs to get on and off a cat that I can recall... Holds ~20.
You can see the cat disappearing where Nordic Valley ski area is and Snowbasin is in the upper left. I had heard the name, but never knew where Nordic Valley ski area was till now.
We found some pretty good snow after talking to a patroller. Though we also had a flounder in the deep unpacked snow too...
We ended the rapidly warming day with a couple runs on Paradise chair roughly between Lakeview 4 and Snowcatcher. That face and some of Lightning Ridge is some of the little terrain that faces N or NE. Most of the resort was softening snow surfaces, but not mush or full transition to spring at all.
That Paradise run would be Key for day #2.
Snow was back for Day #2. Starting just before opening and coming down hard initially. I was ahead of the others in getting going (I needed to dive back to Colo in the afternoon). So I made a couple laps on Timberline and Hidden Lake chairs exploring the edges to test out conditions. In General a full mixed bag, some places soft-ish, others with a firmer subsurface others had refrozen underneath. After meeting up with the late-comers we decided to try out Woodys again and instantly regretted it. That sector clearly had softened and was a mix of refrozen or thick zipper crust underneath the couple of new inches. It was all we could do to stay upright for all three of us ex-racers. Eventually I figured out that the right hand side of pine trees had blocked the sun and it was still powder there and only there. It allowed us to link 2-6 turns of soft and nice skiing in between the openings in the trees. Eventually making it to the road for bus pick-up. I was surprised it was open at all given the conditions.
Then I knew exactly where I would be skiing the rest of my short day. The line that had held soft snow and even powder at the end of the day off of Paradise. Only how to get there without wasting time. At the top of Timberline chair a resort host who was trying to be helpful seemed confused about the question of getting there without taking an entire run of valley level traverses all the way to the bottom of Paradise Chair. He also was not allowed to take anyone anywhere on anything other than groomers for liability reasons. Using my instincts instead of the supposedly local knowledge we made the traverse across and slightly below the ridge that has the upper part of Paradise chair, hitting the soft snow and powder run about 200 vertical down it's ~1200 of sustained pitch (I figure that run has ~200 verts lost at the top traversing the ridge and 200 verts lost in the collector cat track on a 1600 vert chair).
I lapped that 3 times in a row before heading back to Timberline to end my day at 1p.
I feel like I can pretty much guarantee that that was probably the best snow on the entire mountain that day since it hadn't gotten the sun from the prior day, nor been fully skied out in the previous storm cycle, whereas the vast majority of PowMow faces either East or West. I left at a good time as PowMow shut due to lightning, reopened for a bit then shut for the day early due to lightning again. With ~3" having fallen during my time there.
I'll leave you with a few select pics from the drive through Wyoming. Arriving home ~8:45p.
