Day 45: Unexpected friends.
I found out at around 8 p.m. last night that my buddy Sima was en route to SLC. Apparently I didn't fully understand his wife Mira's thick Serbian accent on the phone when she called a week or two ago. Sima was traveling with another Serb I've met on previous trips, Mikita. A pleasant surprise!
So I worked all evening last night to get enough of today's job done to enable me to get out on the hill with them for a bit this morning. And what a beautiful morning it was. Every inch of yesterday's 15" accessible without hiking was tracked up, but there were still light and fluffy spots to be found, like Route 5 Shot 10, which was our first run scouted from the Tram. We also took a run way, way out beyond Thunder Bowl, to the point that we were actually below the Coffin Chutes at one point.
Things looked really wintry and frosty today, thanks both to rime and to the horrific winds over the past week. I've never seen such thick deposits on Utah trees before.
I spotted a line what was untracked, but you could only get to it from Alta, so I brought the guys out into Mineral Basin to head up to Hidden Peak and start hiking to the High Baldy Traverse to the Armpit Gate into Alta. Clicking back into our skis I heard my name behind me, and it was journalist Jill Adler and Sarah Langridge of Snowlist. They joined us for the run before we headed into the Rendezvous for a bite to eat. Great to see you, ladies! (And yes, the run was untracked, the last thing left from yesterday's storm, although the top part had a slight zipper crust that nonetheless skied quite well.)
One quick run back up Peruvian put me at my car on the Bypass Road to end my day. For some reason my tracking app stopped tracking us when we arrived at the top of Wildcat, and I didn't bother recording my final trip up Peruvian:
http://www.mountaindynamics.com/en/sdmap.php?tid=15462
I found out at around 8 p.m. last night that my buddy Sima was en route to SLC. Apparently I didn't fully understand his wife Mira's thick Serbian accent on the phone when she called a week or two ago. Sima was traveling with another Serb I've met on previous trips, Mikita. A pleasant surprise!
So I worked all evening last night to get enough of today's job done to enable me to get out on the hill with them for a bit this morning. And what a beautiful morning it was. Every inch of yesterday's 15" accessible without hiking was tracked up, but there were still light and fluffy spots to be found, like Route 5 Shot 10, which was our first run scouted from the Tram. We also took a run way, way out beyond Thunder Bowl, to the point that we were actually below the Coffin Chutes at one point.
Things looked really wintry and frosty today, thanks both to rime and to the horrific winds over the past week. I've never seen such thick deposits on Utah trees before.
I spotted a line what was untracked, but you could only get to it from Alta, so I brought the guys out into Mineral Basin to head up to Hidden Peak and start hiking to the High Baldy Traverse to the Armpit Gate into Alta. Clicking back into our skis I heard my name behind me, and it was journalist Jill Adler and Sarah Langridge of Snowlist. They joined us for the run before we headed into the Rendezvous for a bite to eat. Great to see you, ladies! (And yes, the run was untracked, the last thing left from yesterday's storm, although the top part had a slight zipper crust that nonetheless skied quite well.)
One quick run back up Peruvian put me at my car on the Bypass Road to end my day. For some reason my tracking app stopped tracking us when we arrived at the top of Wildcat, and I didn't bother recording my final trip up Peruvian:
http://www.mountaindynamics.com/en/sdmap.php?tid=15462
