For a long stretch, I made a point of starting my season in Utah; however, five years had passed since I was here last, before Alterra transformed the ski industry with a pass covering the four Cottonwoods ski areas, Deer Valley, and more recently Snowbasin. I decided to kick off my 2022-23 season with four ski days in BCC, staying with my NJ expat friend Bryan, who moved to a condo at Solitude Village eight years ago and has been living the life ever since.
The only sub-optimum news was that I arrived just after a handful of powder days and was looking at a period of cold temps, sun, and high-pressure. Still, I was happy to get my ski legs out of storage on mostly soft conditions with occasional hardscrabble on steeper, high-trafficked sections.
Uncharacteristic for me, I wasn't in a photo-taking mood until Day 3 when we got a few decent pix of me on a favorite intermediate trail at Solitude: Diamond Lane off the Powderhorn chair:
Since we're only a few days away from the winter equinox, the light is odd right now with big shadows and wildly varying colors depending on which direction you're shooting:
I was happy to learn that Bryan had added to his quiver a variation of the Kästle ski that I've been on the past four seasons -- mine on the left are from 2017; his are from 2020.
Table cornhole at the Roundhouse:
I wrapped things up with a dip in the outdoor pool -- a wee bit more comfortable than a polar plunge in the Antarctic:
On Saturday evening, they held a 65th anniversary celebration for the resort with guest speakers, memorabilia, photos from across the decades, and birthday cakes. Apparently, I was one of the few people in attendance who wasn't familiar with the story of how the resort came about. Founder Bob Barrett was skiing at Alta and not provided access to a men's room. He was so incensed that he decided to build his own ski area in the next canyon over and thus began Solitude.
Commemorative Koozie:
An interesting factoid that I learned during the presentation -- following the snowless winter of 1976-77, Solitude went into foreclosure and reopened in 1978 under new ownership. Here's the trail map from that year showing, from left to right, the original Powderhorn and Moonbeam chairs along with the Inspiration chair, which covers most of the terrain now served by the Eagle chair.
In 1982, they added the Sunrise and Summit chairs on the looker's left along along with the SolBright connector to Brighton further up the canyon.
Here's a 1988 newspaper clipping with the announcement of Solitude's plan to create a European-style base village:
This is what the village looks like today -- on our way to getting first chair on the 8 am lift opening:
Bryan and his colleague Rodger, a former professional exploration geologist, lead an interesting bit of programming: a twice-weekly geology tour of Solitude where you learn how the terrain was created starting more than 700 million years ago -- a shallow sea (up to 600 feet deep) sea deposited sediments across a landscape similar to today's East Coast:
This was followed by mountain building over the last 70 million years as the Pacific Oceanic plate slid under the North American plate along with extensive glaciation during several major ice ages including the most recent one that peaked 25,000 years ago.
Here, Rodger points out folding and faulting on the left, as well as magma that had intruded into the existing rock, causing uplift at the Honeycomb Canyon gate:
They also mentioned the comparatively recent mining history of Solitude and the Cottonwood Canyons, including major events that happened at places I've skied past dozens of times over the years. Here we stopped at Lake Solitude in the Summit sector, where a major avalanche that killed several miners in 1911 occurred.
The only sub-optimum news was that I arrived just after a handful of powder days and was looking at a period of cold temps, sun, and high-pressure. Still, I was happy to get my ski legs out of storage on mostly soft conditions with occasional hardscrabble on steeper, high-trafficked sections.
Uncharacteristic for me, I wasn't in a photo-taking mood until Day 3 when we got a few decent pix of me on a favorite intermediate trail at Solitude: Diamond Lane off the Powderhorn chair:
Since we're only a few days away from the winter equinox, the light is odd right now with big shadows and wildly varying colors depending on which direction you're shooting:
I was happy to learn that Bryan had added to his quiver a variation of the Kästle ski that I've been on the past four seasons -- mine on the left are from 2017; his are from 2020.
Table cornhole at the Roundhouse:
I wrapped things up with a dip in the outdoor pool -- a wee bit more comfortable than a polar plunge in the Antarctic:
On Saturday evening, they held a 65th anniversary celebration for the resort with guest speakers, memorabilia, photos from across the decades, and birthday cakes. Apparently, I was one of the few people in attendance who wasn't familiar with the story of how the resort came about. Founder Bob Barrett was skiing at Alta and not provided access to a men's room. He was so incensed that he decided to build his own ski area in the next canyon over and thus began Solitude.
Commemorative Koozie:
An interesting factoid that I learned during the presentation -- following the snowless winter of 1976-77, Solitude went into foreclosure and reopened in 1978 under new ownership. Here's the trail map from that year showing, from left to right, the original Powderhorn and Moonbeam chairs along with the Inspiration chair, which covers most of the terrain now served by the Eagle chair.
In 1982, they added the Sunrise and Summit chairs on the looker's left along along with the SolBright connector to Brighton further up the canyon.
Here's a 1988 newspaper clipping with the announcement of Solitude's plan to create a European-style base village:
This is what the village looks like today -- on our way to getting first chair on the 8 am lift opening:
Bryan and his colleague Rodger, a former professional exploration geologist, lead an interesting bit of programming: a twice-weekly geology tour of Solitude where you learn how the terrain was created starting more than 700 million years ago -- a shallow sea (up to 600 feet deep) sea deposited sediments across a landscape similar to today's East Coast:
This was followed by mountain building over the last 70 million years as the Pacific Oceanic plate slid under the North American plate along with extensive glaciation during several major ice ages including the most recent one that peaked 25,000 years ago.
Here, Rodger points out folding and faulting on the left, as well as magma that had intruded into the existing rock, causing uplift at the Honeycomb Canyon gate:
They also mentioned the comparatively recent mining history of Solitude and the Cottonwood Canyons, including major events that happened at places I've skied past dozens of times over the years. Here we stopped at Lake Solitude in the Summit sector, where a major avalanche that killed several miners in 1911 occurred.
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