I would imagine much of Highboy and Eagle's Nest retained winter snow well into the week. The problem is you want to ski winter snow in the morning until other aspects soften. But the High T is going be brutal refrozen crap until well past noon under last week's conditions.
My Utah experience over 2 decades was mostly in March and disproportionately with weather like last week. So no surprise I developed a strong bias in favor of Snowbird over Alta. While I still believe in Snowbird's advantages of scale, more long and steep runs with better direct access, and better layout during spring conditions, my more recent experience has demonstrated some of Alta's advantages. Early season coverage is the one I knew about for awhile. But a significant subset of powder days may work better at Alta. In particular, in the early stages of a storm you'll get more flotation from more snow sooner and moderate angle terrain where you would be bottoming out on steeper/bumpier places next door. Alta's later opening time and smaller bed base onsite probably present an advantage on days like today for those in SLC when the road opens at 9AM and you arrive at Alta just as the lifts are loading while Snowbird has already been worked by eager powderhounds for 15 more minutes with more lift capacity. And Alta's lift capacity seems adequate to its business now, which it certainly was not before Collins was built in 2004. I had only one lift line today over ~5-7 minutes (and also no wait for lunch, which can be a serious issue at Snowbird), that being Collins between 11:10 and 11:26 and thus ended up with 22,200 vertical, not bad on a day with 38 inches of new snow and lots of powder-starved locals in a below average season.
The powder day issue that still concerns me is the gradual opening of terrain, which is often slower at Alta (per BobbyD, whose powder day sample size is far larger than mine). As epic as Alta was today, open terrain was close to skied out when I went in for lunch at 12:45 because as usual Backside, Ballroom, Catherine's, Supreme Bowl and the Snowbird gates were all closed. I got lucky after lunch because Supreme Bowl opened at 1:45 while I was there. At Snowbird it is most common that only Road to Provo, the Bookends and Tigertail/Thunder Bowl stay closed as frequently all day as the above spots at Alta. So while Snowbird has only 30% more listed acreage than Alta, I suspect that on a lot of powder days there's twice as much open acreage at Snowbird vs. Alta. Yes, I've heard all of Mineral Basin was closed today. But it was open Sunday when Alta had similar terrain closures, Keyhole being the only run open at Alta Sunday but not Monday.
For a non-storm day when most terrain is likely to open eventually I still advocate the combined pass for maximum flexibility in timing openings. On snowy days like the past 2 it's more difficult with most of the connecting terrain closed.
from the Altaphiles, but the remaining winter snow is a lot easier to get at at Snowbird than at Alta.