2013 - Powder Mountain / Snowbasin

2013 brought the desire to explore a new ski area which took us to Powder Mountain.  We'd heard about it - 7000+ acres, powder that isn't skied out for days - and it was time.  Once again, a cheap rental car brought us to the canyons north of Salt Lake where we stayed in Wolf Hollow.  Frankel got the "big bed", and Mark got his first ever trip to Target for grocery shopping.

Lots of short videos on the trip, but this one is probably the funniest.  

Friday at Powder was officially deemed our weirdest day ever.  The mountain is laid out very strangely - more like a bunch of interconnected hills than your traditional ski resort.  Dense ice fog in the morning (which annoyingly coated our goggles) didn't help us figure out how the place was configured.  A little left over powder from the dump they had the prior weekend was nice, but overall we gave the day a big "eh".  We did do a Cat ride into the backcountry, where we literally had 700 acres to ourselves.  And we took the "Powder Mountain Express Bus" - ski down to the road, and get a ride back up.  Saturday was sunny and warm so we headed to Snowbasin (SLC Olympic Downhill 2002) for a delightful day with sunglasses and tunes, temps over 40 led to a slushy slopes by the end of the day.  Sunday we awoke to rain, which changed to sleet at the base of Snowbasin.  But as we rode the gondy (to stay dry) we were greeted at the top of the mountain with powder.  Probably around 5" all told - not the typical Utah powder (water density at Alta 11%, vs typical 5%) - but gave us some good freshies.  Got very disoriented after riding the Allen Peak tram into an extremely dense fog.  It was a tale of two mountains - nice up high, but wet and slushy near the bottom.  Sunday brought us back to Powder mountain where the new snow and total lack of crowds created the best day of the trip.  We had some excellent runs through untracked snow in the aspens (above). 

Looking forward to 2014 -
The year of turning the big 5-0. 

Destination: TBD