First off, let me just say Hi since this is my first post here. My wife and I are both born and bred in upstate NY and pound out as many runs as we can each winter weekend at our local 800ft ant hill. I'm a 30r old self-taught life long skier who introduced his wife to the sport two years ago. As a credit to my wife, she stuck with it, and is now as addicted to it as anyone I've met. I'm a lucky SOB. \
/
We arrived in Utah yesterday (Saturday 4/17) and, after picking up our rental SUV, drove the 45 mins up LCC and checked into Cliff Lodge at Snowbird. This will be our home base for the next seven days.
Because it's our first time to Utah, we wanted to hit up as many resorts as we could. Today we decided to visit Solitude on its closing day. We arrived at Moonbeam Lodge at 8:45 to crystal clear bluebirds and four other cars in the lot. The Sunrise, Summit, and Honeycomb lifts are all shutdown for the season, so we'd be stuck on the lower half of the mountain all day. Since the temps rapidly rose into the 60s, this would greatly impact us by late morning.
We started on Moonbeam Express and regained our ski confidence on a few blue runs. We hadn't skied since March 27th back East.
After this, we made our way over to Eagle Express, where we charged down the wide open groomers available from this lift. At this point in the day, the groomers had softened enough that you weren't rattling your teeth out, but not so much that they were Mom's mashed potatoes. Mrs. AndreB and I were both impressed with the immaculate grooming.
Before our legs started to yell at us (remember, it's our first day at this altitude), we decided to ride up Powderhorn and check out the steep groomers to skier's right. Back East, we'll find runs with this type of pitch, but only for 100ft or so. It's a thrill to sustain greater pitches for longer distances, as well as a challenge to keep our speed down since the natural tendency on a groomer is to put down railroad tracks and rip it up. Both of us learned that sliding some turns to scrub off speed is not necessarily a bad thing on these steeper runs.
Slopes were quickly getting slushy, as we tried to keep our body temps down by shedding layers. A trip to the car to deposit our jackets helped immensely.
By now we were ready to see some more of the mountain, so we headed over to the Apex lift. With the sun baking all aspects of the available terrain, the blues off Apex deteriorated quickly. We took one run down to the bottom of Apex and decided we'd seen enough of this lift. We rode up once more to make our way back down to Moonbeam.
Sensing it was a good time to call it a day, we went up to the deck on the 2nd floor of Moonbeam to scarf some food and soak up the sunshine. It was just before noon. After a yummy chicken Caesar wrap and a beer of questionable quality (what was I thinking grabbing a PBR?), we grabbed some stickers and sew-on patches from the shop and departed Solitude.
We thought we'd be tricky and continue through BCC over to Park City. The joke was on us when the road ended, covered with an endless 4-feet sheet of snow. After snapping some scenic photos, we headed back to our homebase and our trip to BCC was, sadly, over.
Total vert for the day as 13,000. Not bad for our first day!
Our schedule for the rest of the week is Snowbird (Monday), Snowbird (Tuesday), recovery day (Wednesday), Snowbird (Thursday), and Alta (Friday).
/ We arrived in Utah yesterday (Saturday 4/17) and, after picking up our rental SUV, drove the 45 mins up LCC and checked into Cliff Lodge at Snowbird. This will be our home base for the next seven days.
Because it's our first time to Utah, we wanted to hit up as many resorts as we could. Today we decided to visit Solitude on its closing day. We arrived at Moonbeam Lodge at 8:45 to crystal clear bluebirds and four other cars in the lot. The Sunrise, Summit, and Honeycomb lifts are all shutdown for the season, so we'd be stuck on the lower half of the mountain all day. Since the temps rapidly rose into the 60s, this would greatly impact us by late morning.
We started on Moonbeam Express and regained our ski confidence on a few blue runs. We hadn't skied since March 27th back East.
After this, we made our way over to Eagle Express, where we charged down the wide open groomers available from this lift. At this point in the day, the groomers had softened enough that you weren't rattling your teeth out, but not so much that they were Mom's mashed potatoes. Mrs. AndreB and I were both impressed with the immaculate grooming.
Before our legs started to yell at us (remember, it's our first day at this altitude), we decided to ride up Powderhorn and check out the steep groomers to skier's right. Back East, we'll find runs with this type of pitch, but only for 100ft or so. It's a thrill to sustain greater pitches for longer distances, as well as a challenge to keep our speed down since the natural tendency on a groomer is to put down railroad tracks and rip it up. Both of us learned that sliding some turns to scrub off speed is not necessarily a bad thing on these steeper runs.
Slopes were quickly getting slushy, as we tried to keep our body temps down by shedding layers. A trip to the car to deposit our jackets helped immensely.
By now we were ready to see some more of the mountain, so we headed over to the Apex lift. With the sun baking all aspects of the available terrain, the blues off Apex deteriorated quickly. We took one run down to the bottom of Apex and decided we'd seen enough of this lift. We rode up once more to make our way back down to Moonbeam.
Sensing it was a good time to call it a day, we went up to the deck on the 2nd floor of Moonbeam to scarf some food and soak up the sunshine. It was just before noon. After a yummy chicken Caesar wrap and a beer of questionable quality (what was I thinking grabbing a PBR?), we grabbed some stickers and sew-on patches from the shop and departed Solitude.
We thought we'd be tricky and continue through BCC over to Park City. The joke was on us when the road ended, covered with an endless 4-feet sheet of snow. After snapping some scenic photos, we headed back to our homebase and our trip to BCC was, sadly, over.
Total vert for the day as 13,000. Not bad for our first day!
Our schedule for the rest of the week is Snowbird (Monday), Snowbird (Tuesday), recovery day (Wednesday), Snowbird (Thursday), and Alta (Friday).
