I was beat from a longer than necessary drive Thursday (I had an extra 4 hours to retrieve my wine case for the Iron Blosam #-o ) so I didn't get out the door until 8:15. With a canyon checkpoint and lots of traffic (as much or more than Saturday) it was 10AM when I left the Snowbird ticket office with my 10-day pass and headed for the Peruvian chair. I knew not to even look at the tram with that many people.
The predicted storm had arrived early and up top there were at least the 17 inches reported. I went through the tunnel into Mineral Basin, which rated to have the deepest snow. There was a tradeoff in visibility as it was still snowing, but as I mentioned the next day visibility is somewhat of a moot point if the snow is blowing over your head. :-D So I spent the rest of the morning doing 4 laps on Mineral and one on Baldy. The bad visibility held Mineral's lift line down to 5 minutes or so, and both locals and visitors on the chair rides were delighted with the morning. Just after noon I headed down via the Little Cloud closure rope and some trees of Black Forest. Visibility was better but there had been more skier traffic, and I got a scare from a slight lower back spasm while powering through a powder-over-moguls turn. I went into the Rendezvous for a lunch break (very busy down there) and eventually met admin about 1:30, where we learned that the road would be closed until 3:30.
We headed out via Peruvian and the tunnel into deteriorating weather that now included gusty winds that had only been at the very top of Hidden Peak in the morning. Mineral Basin was now more difficult as it had been skied enough that it was not the easy flotation it had been earlier, thus making the visibility more of an issue. Admin suggested heading down via South Chute, but while on the Ho Chi Minh Trail winds were gusting so strongly from the west that a leeward Tower 3 seemed a wiser choice. I had a great run on Tower 3, but admin didn't like the visibility and thus opted for a more sheltered Upper Dalton's. When he quit I did one more Peruvian/Mineral circuit, coming back via Upper Silver Fox, then cutting back to one of the lower chutes under the tram. From Chip's I needed to divert to Blackjack to reach my car in the upper part of the bypass road parking lot. Total 19,400 vertical, ~12K of powder. Needless to say, weather was too obnoxious to mess with the camera. The road opened a few minutes early and we were on our way down at 3:30.
There was some discussion over the weekend that Snowbird is noticeably more crowded than Alta this year, as evidenced by reports from several of admin's posse skiing Alta Friday. This is of course contrary to the decades when Alta had only slow lifts and severe weekend/holiday lift lines. Since Collins went high speed I've considered waits at the areas to be comparable, so naturally I wondered what's changed recently. Snowbird is more aggressive with promotions this season, and in particular cut-rate midweek lift-and-lodging packages. It does not affect line waits too much as long as you avoid the full maze trams, but it does affect how fast powder gets tracked, particularly when Road to Provo, Powder Paradise, Baldy, Tigertail etc. are closed for snow stability.
At any rate, during my Iron Blosam week, the renewable 10-pack Snowbird ticket gives me more flexibility if I want to ski Alta a day or two during that time.
