Just a quick report today, for it was a quick day of skiing.
The rain/snow line was heading incredibly high today -- 8,500 feet per the NWS -- before the cold front tonight brings lower snow levels and another batch of precip. The kid and I headed up to Little Cottonwood Canyon this morning, and left early to get a good place in line for when the road opened following avalanche control work.
By 9 a.m., however, as they kept pushing the estimated time further and further back, we turned around and headed up the open Big Cottonwood Canyon to Solitude. We got within a few hundred feet of the base area before the rain finally turned to snow, but it was the wettest, heaviest stuff that I've ever skied. This stuff made Sierra Cement seem light and fluffy. Down low, you had to stay on something with pitch, and skier traffic packed the stuff into all sorts of weird patterns where it was getting skied. And we couldn't get to anything above Powderhorn, for they were bombing the Summit area like crazy.
Solitude was in great shape, though, and should be terrific tomorrow, as should everything along the Wasatch Front. Once we learned at 11:15 that the Summit Lift and Honeycomb wouldn't open at all today, we opted instead to pack it in after only four runs as the heavy snowfall lightened in intensity, and save our energy for tomorrow.
The rain/snow line was heading incredibly high today -- 8,500 feet per the NWS -- before the cold front tonight brings lower snow levels and another batch of precip. The kid and I headed up to Little Cottonwood Canyon this morning, and left early to get a good place in line for when the road opened following avalanche control work.
By 9 a.m., however, as they kept pushing the estimated time further and further back, we turned around and headed up the open Big Cottonwood Canyon to Solitude. We got within a few hundred feet of the base area before the rain finally turned to snow, but it was the wettest, heaviest stuff that I've ever skied. This stuff made Sierra Cement seem light and fluffy. Down low, you had to stay on something with pitch, and skier traffic packed the stuff into all sorts of weird patterns where it was getting skied. And we couldn't get to anything above Powderhorn, for they were bombing the Summit area like crazy.
Solitude was in great shape, though, and should be terrific tomorrow, as should everything along the Wasatch Front. Once we learned at 11:15 that the Summit Lift and Honeycomb wouldn't open at all today, we opted instead to pack it in after only four runs as the heavy snowfall lightened in intensity, and save our energy for tomorrow.
